Quotes About Despair

The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep, those haunted by one thing or another: love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.

Sally...can no longer think of love as a reality, or even as a possibility, however remote.

But children can tell when love has been lost, they know when silence means peace and when it's a sign of despair.

Believers with nothing to believe in.

Cover up grief and it grinds away at you from the inside out. It makes you run for dark corners and empty rooms heartsick and mute despising your own company.

Jet's hair was so tangled a brush would no longer go through it. She didn't bathe and ate only crackers and ginger ale. She slept with the edition of Emily Dickinson that Levi had given her. Inside he had written Forever—is composed of—Nows.

What was life anyway? Only a continuous vale of sadness and tears.

She knew that sometimes when you were supposed to feel lucky, all you felt was despair. You were guilty just because you had managed to live. For reasons you couldn't understand, that made no sense whatsoever, you were the one left unscathed.

Winter in New England is merciless and cruel, a season that instills a particular melancholy in its residents and a hopelessness that is all but impossible to shake.

She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor.

The devil loves these short, dark days.

The automatic, natural contact with his own emotions and needs gives an individual strength and self-esteem. He may experience his feelings—sadness, despair, or the need for help—without fear of making the mother insecure. He can allow himself to be afraid when he is threatened, angry when his wishes are not fulfilled. He knows not only what he does not want but also what he wants and is able to express his wants, irrespective of whether he will be loved or hated for it.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.

Do you know how alone I've always felt?

My heart hurt so much I can't believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this?

No one escapes a time in life when the arrow of sorrow, of anger, of despair pierces the heart. For many of us, there is the inevitable need to circle the wound. It is often such a surprise to find it there, in us, when we had assumed arrows so painful only landed in the hearts of other people. Some of us spend decades screaming at the archer. Or at least for longer periods than are good for us. How to take the arrow out of the heart? How to learn to relieve our own pain? That is the question.

In our despair that justice is slow we sit with heads bowed wondering how even whether we will ever be healed. Perhaps it is a question only the ravaged the violated seriously ask. And is that not now almost all of us? But hope is on the way. As usual Hope is a woman herding her children around her all she retains of who she was; as usual except for her kids she has lost almost everything. Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

despair cannot share the same space as wonder

I think part of my illogical despair had been due to my sense of political powerlessness, caused to some extent by a lack of living models.

The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled.

Can't you see I'm already half dead.