Quotes About Despair

Despair is so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannekin in the window. It could be dispelled by the lights surrounding a tower. It would be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. Meaningless, I almost said, aloud.

he felt ugly, loathsome, unfit to live, existing from moment to moment like an addict. He gravitated to the crippled, the diseased, the bohemian, and the downtrodden when he wanted an evening of conversation, just a little cerebral companionship.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself. I walked black streets and alleys alone; I passed out in cabarets. I backed out of two duels more from apathy than cowardice and truly wished to be murdered. And then I was attacked. It might have been anyone-and my invitation was open to sailors, thieves, maniacs, anyone. But it was a vampire. He caught me lust a few steps from my door one night and left me for dead, or so I thought.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself. I

The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting?

All my struggles, my triumphs, my losses, were being eclipsed by what was being revealed now. Had ever ennui and despair been banished by such revelations, such precious gifts of truth?

buckled under the weight of a loneliness so terrible I would have chosen death then if only I'd had such a choice.

What can the damned really say to the damned?

Some of us are infinitely better at being miserable than happy," he said gently. "We're good at it, and proud of it, and we get better and better at it, and we simply don't know what it means to be happy.

An icy gust of air rose from the open doors. Blackness. I cannot be locked in blackness. I cannot! And finally he screamed. He couldn't hold it back any longer. He screamed, the terrible cry begun before he was pushed forward, before he felt himself topple from the threshold, before he realized he was plunging down and down into the blackness, into the nothingness...

and when I took my fingers down, there was the stain of the tears, tinged with mortal blood. And already there was begun in me the tingling of the monster that had killed, and would kill again

An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act.

They float upon the surface of the darkness in which I am drowning.

She stood listening to the blood inside her, and marveling in a crazed, despairing way that it could still refresh her and strengthen her, even now. Sad, grief-stricken, she looked at the lovely stark wilderness encircling the temple, she looked up at the loose and billowing clouds. How the blood gave her courage, how it gave her a momentary belief in the sheer rightness of the universe?fruits of a ghastly, unforgivable act. If the mind can find no meaning, then the senses give it.

I was weak from the heat of my own miserable thoughts.

It gave me no hope to see him doing these simple things with the sluggishness of a somnambulist. It proved nothing more than that he could go like this forever, our silent accomplice, little more than a resuscitated corpse.

You cut my heart out of my chest while I lived and breathed, and you took it with you! We shall be together this night in Hell.

How alien all humans seemed, and how hopeless their plight. Cursed as he was, he could not die, but death was breathing on all of them.

It was hitting me again like so many violent blows that my world was dashed, that my house was ruined, that Amadeo was stolen from me.

away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things. Please forgive me if I sound bitter.

beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony?

Let me cry for it. It was all my doing. Because I didn't slay the one who despised me. And they have taken Amadeo prisoner. Me, they burnt because I was too strong for their designs, but Amadeo they took!

His mind was full of the verbal instruments by which he could bring about his own despair.