Quotes About Despair

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power of the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.

The feeling that I've done something wrong, that I really don't know what it is, that there's something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone's love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else--someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.

Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let go. Fear stands in the way of love.

The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.

Like all great mysteries, we are all mysteriously called to love no matter the conditions of our lives, the degree of our depravity or despair. The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope.

Hopelessness generates inactivity.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime.

When despair prevails we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance.

When despair prevails we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance. Paulo Friere reminds us that "without a vision for tomorrow hope is impossible." Our visions for tomorrow are most vital when they emerge from the concrete circumstances of change we are experiencing right now.

Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let fear go. Fear stands in the way of love.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found.

Young progressives committed to social justice who had found it easy to maintain radical politics when they were living on the edge, on the outside, did not want to do the hard work of changing and reorganizing our existing system in ways that would affirm the values of peace and love, or democracy and justice. They fell into despair. And that despair made capitulation to the existing social order the only place of comfort.

T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.

in the background, behind everything he did or said or thought, like a low hum, was an unyielding sadness, an emotional blackness that threatened to bloom into depression should he pause to examine it.

And in the background, behind everything he did or said or thought, like a low hum, was an unyielding sadness, an emotional blackness that threatened to bloom into depression should he pause to examine it.

Love's madness, swinging from ecstasy to despair in one wild second.

Once they passed a village sacked by the French. Not a building remained intact, not a person was in sight, not an animal still lived.

Perhaps you think it's quiet in the prison, but it's noisy. For every activity iron doors have to be opened and closed and iron passageways and iron steps have to be walked down. By day people shout at one another and at night they shout in their sleep....You want to know what the worst thing is? That life is elsewhere. That you're cut off from kt and rotting, and the longer you wait for afterward, the less afterward is worth.