Quotes About Hopelessness

Sin embargo, Erdosain no se movía de allí… Quería decirles algo, no sabía cómo, pero algo que les diera a comprender a ellos toda la desdicha inmensa que pesaba sobre su vida; y permanecía así, de pie, triste, con el cubo negro de la caja de hierro ante los ojos, sintiendo que a medida que pasaban los minutos su espalda se arqueaba más, mientras que nerviosamente retorcía el ala de su sombrero negro, y la mirada se le hacía más huida y triste.

My dream was dead in my arms.

Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.

That sound you hear is my dreams crashing and burning.

Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget. After

Squalor has nothing to do with money. Squalor happens when people are sad. And

Some days must be dark and sad and dreary.

Poor little Margaret, no hope for you when Faust and Mephistopheles are one.

In the kitchen reigned confusion and despair. One edition of jelly was trickled from pot to pot, another lay upon the floor, and a third was burning gaily on the stove. Lotty, with Teutonic phlegm, was calmly eating bread and currant wine, for the jelly was still in a hopelessly liquid state, while Mrs. Brooke, with her apron over her head, sat sobbing dismally.

She is one of the timid, innocent, humble, creatures who can't push their way, and so get put aside and forgotten, She has tried all sorts of poorly paid work, couldn't live on it decently, got discouraged, sick, frightened, and could see no refuge from the big, bad world but to get out of it while she wasn't afraid to die. A very old story, my dear, new and dreadful as it seems to you.

There were no colors. Everything was neutral. From this I know that hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise.

Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.

So then Joseph knew that he had no idea how to escape from the darkness closing round him, unless it might be to engineer his own death,...

it wouldn't matter if I bumped and bounced like a cabbage all the way down until I hit bottom and then rolled out to sea, because at least I'd be safe and dead.

in a squalid, run-down house in the worst

Most of the advice was along the lines of, "If you persevere in your efforts you will surely succeed," which is bullshit, if you ask me. People who turn to stuff like this have probably already persevered and gotten nowhere.

I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it - alas, not even the bliss of heaven.

So to be sick unto death is not to be able to die -- yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.

If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to your self in despair.

My soul is so heavy that no longer can any thought sustain it, no wingbeat lift it up into the ether. If it moves, it only sweeps along the ground like the low flight of birds when a thunderstorm is brewing.

Hence it is a superficial view (which presumably has never seen a person in despair, not even one's own self) when it is said of a man in despair, He is consuming himself. For precisely this it is he despairs of, and to his torment it is precisely this he cannot do, since by despair fire has entered into something that cannot burn, or cannot burn up, that is, into the self.

It is an infinite merit to be able to despair.

optimism is a disease

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.