Quotes About Despair

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

He laughed again: the horror of the world lay like infection in his throat.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

It was like hate on a deathbed.

Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.

She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair.

I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

Failures like ours are often just failures of hope. Please – cannot you say you are sorry you did not have more hope?

I'm sick with life, I'm rotten with health.

I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being's capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.

Aren't we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me.

The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust.

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.

I find myself always torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it appears better it is really worse.

If the Domain is destroyed, I have condemned my husband to an eternity of darkness, silence, with only his own rage and madness to keep him company.

You think you know horror, Irnakk? Horror is looking into the eyes of the Shadowed One, knowing you are about to die... and then being forced to live. Horror is waking each day to see every part of your body moving on its own - a shifting mass of Protodites where once was solid metal and living tissue. Horror is what is in the eyes of your partners when they look at you... and in the cries of your enemies when your swarm engulfs them. Don't talk to me about fear, creature - I am fear! -Zaktan

The moment between breaths Is the balance of the Force. Between life and death. Rest and action. Serenity and passion. Hope and despair. —

It was that she knew that in a very real way the situation was hopeless.

somewhat sad mill city north of Seattle that seemed always on a futile hunt for a lasting jolt of optimism.

suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.

Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.

No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.