Quotes About Despair

Things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering […] bleeding and more bleeding.

They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.

Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame

they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror.

And there is no nicer time on earth than now—everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential—the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.

In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.

And now he couldn't cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds.

That's your solution?' asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. 'Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?' 'Do you have a better idea?' She turned away.

Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he'd absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he'd gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim's. He'd known at some deep, cold level that he would cope. He was wrong. Utterly.

Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair.

I am the great comforter. I bring you solace, understanding, and hope. In times of despair, hope is what you have abandoned.

Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page. THE ARTIST DATE The other basic tool of The Artist's Way may strike you as a nontool, a diversion.

Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not. Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend.

we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success. Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled ... despairing ... But, yes, we do feel safe. And safety is a very expensive illusion ... Usually, when we say we can't do something, what we mean is that we won't do something unless we can guarantee that we'll do it perfectly.

Where is the voice of freedom, / freedom to laugh, / to move / without the heavy phantom of despair? (From Farewell from Welfare Island)

Is despair wrong? Isn't it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?

Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?