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Quotes About Despair

There're a lot of things you don't understand. Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma's death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it
~ Madeleine L'Engle
With my intellect I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can't settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it...There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises... That's enough to keep my heart optimistic no matter how pessimistic my mind.
~ Madeleine L'Engle
No, it was not anger, it was loathing; it was hatred, sheer and unadulterated, and as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT.
~ Madeleine L'Engle
With my intellect I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can't settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it.
~ Madeleine L'Engle
Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.
~ Maeve Binchy
Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)
~ Maggie Nelson
There's something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions.
~ Maggie Nelson
One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.
~ Malcolm Bradbury
The business of a lecturer is, of course, to lecture. Petworth has not come this far,crossed two time-zones, found other skies and other birds,simply in order to answer toasts, to visit tombs, to worry about domestic disorders, to catch himself in the thorny thickets of sexual confusion, split loyalties, divided attachments,to know desire or despair, to fall in love with lady writers ; he has come to perform utterance.
~ Malcolm Bradbury
If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force.
~ Malcolm Gladwell
He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead.
~ Malcolm Lowry
Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey.
~ Malcolm Lowry
Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was—The square gave him no answer.
~ Malcolm Lowry
The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare.
~ Malcolm Lowry
Black Flowers is the name of that song." Cervantes was about to beckon the man to come in. "It say:—I suffer, because your lips say only lies and they have death in a kiss.
~ Malcolm Lowry
Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been?
~ Malcolm Lowry
It was just possible too of course that he might meet— But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him. The Consul lay face downward on the deserted street.
~ Malcolm Lowry
The more even sounds of the bus wove into Hugh's brain an idiotic syllogism: I am losing the Battle of the Ebro, I am also losing Yvonne, therefore Yvonne is...
~ Malcolm Lowry
When we have reached the depths of despair, only then can we look up and see the light of hope.
~ Stephen Richards
The hopelessness of life is like a weak fire, that can only be extinguished using the fire extinguisher called hope.
~ Auliq-Ice
People don't commit suicide. They get lost in darkness because they can't find any lights of hope.
~ Debasish Mridha
Nothing can be more dreadful than the burden of failure on one's shoulders..
~ Mayank Sengar
The fame is birthed through the opposition. The success through the dynamism of fighting the despair. No fight, No lift!
~ Paul Gitwaza
Magically, hopelessness gives rise to profound hope.
~ Stefan Emunds