Quotes About Futility

Everyone living is doomed

We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.

If the criminal will not keep his gains for ever and his victim will not always suffer want, surely man passes like a shadow and troubles himself in vain.

no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

Aim not, if you are wise, to make water run uphill nor try pulling milk from the udders of a billy-goat.

In another time and place, she might have felt differently, but thinking along those lines was pointless now.

I'm so sorry," he said. "I wish they'd let you two regenerate. I'll keep asking them, I assure you." She gave him a fleeting smile. "Persistence is futile

Arguing with you is going to be a fucking waste of time, isn't it?" She laughed, and the sound slid into his body, an arrow aimed right at his heart. "Yes. You may as well get used to it, honey.

he looked like one of those dried-up faces you carve out of an apple in third grade to teach you that time is cruel and we are all just going to shrivel up and die, so there's no point in getting out of bed.

No. Tommy turned and headed toward the door. As he reached it he turned and said, I'm not fucked. The Sartre reader looked up from his book and said, We all are. We all are.

Getting a rise out of him was like trying to give a handjob to a parking meter: you were going to end up frustrated and exhausted long before a cop came along to haul you away.

Ä°nsan olanaks?z umutlar besleyerek yaÅŸad??? sürece zaten bir kaybedendir.

Most of the boys Lanny had played with here, slightly older than himself, had died in Flanders. The sons they had left behind had died in the recent war; but the breed went on—generation after generation born, raised, educated at great expense and trouble, only to be slaughtered on some foreign field.

I have had opportunity to observe the effects of inherited wealth, and for the average young person it is a sentence to futility and boredom. It cuts the mainspring of activity; the person no longer has to do anything, and so he doesn't, and if he tries, he fails nine times out of ten. You at this moment are providing the strongest incentive to labor that I have ever had in my life.

Despite the far greater carnage between 1939 and 1945, seventy years later historians rarely write of the political or strategic futility of the Second World War as they so often do of the First. Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.

I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.

Men are stupid. You might as well learn that now. Look at bull moose. They ram into each other at full speed. Same with Dall sheep. This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I've never begged. not for anything... except my mother's love.And that was a useless waste of time.

This was a game that kill could not win—or, if it did, it would be an unbearable win that destroyed the very meaning of winning.

That was the year Zosma sank to its knees and bled great gouts of men into a war about nothing.

Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.

It's a lot of work for something that's always going to fall down at the end. But then, all of life is like that. Right?

War is always pointless. That's what I think.

Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can't. You're in a story and the body writing it is an asshole.