Quotes About Despair

Go away, he said. Go away. I wish you had never come here. I wish I had never heard of the Light and the Dark, and your damned old Merriman and his rhymes. If I had your golden harp now I would throw it in the sea. I am not a part of your stupid quest anymore, I don't care what happens to it. And Cafall was never a part of it either, or a part of your pretty pattern. He was my dog, and I loved him more than anything in the world, and now he is dead. Go away .

Children from high-drama households often grow up with the idea that tension is an integral part of love. Therefore, the girl who grows up in a high-drama family is an ideal partner for the charismatic, explosive misogynist. The fighting, the tension, and the drama are normal and familiar to her. She views the swings from despair to joy, from love to hate, from abuse to intense lovemaking as proof of love.

I am dying without death; living without life.

everything had changed, and she had crumpled in front of me, and become wholly broken and lost...

Everything's absolutely fine really—except that sometimes I think I can't go on any more

Ginevra," said my uncle, all despair at once annihilated by his rage, "I swear to you I shall never, never, NEVER, so long as I live, go back to that woman!" He went back to her six months later.

She looked both hurt and broken. As if her spirit had received one too many mortal blows.

There was no quiet, delicate crying, only body-wrenching sobs that clawed at her soul and left her with nothing but a sense of emptiness that she was afraid would never go away.

Hope is better than misery, he said. Or despair. Hope belongs in the same box as despair. Hope is not so bad, he said. At least despair has truth to it.

It seems to me the world is almost too black to behold," Gellhorn wrote Eleanor in February 1938. "Half of it is bullied and terrorized and debased by dictators and half of it is soppy with cowardice and sloth and selfishness.

And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.

I think I feel better. I look at everything from the other end—instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

But now there were ten bells. And the bell for Lost-Hope was ringing violently.

This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.

Her body was heavy and tired, and she thought, I can't carry myself another step into this life.

MEMOIR The genre of an age that's lost all hope of a biographer.

Oh, come back, you people lost to darkness! Come back, you ghosts. The day is hard enough. Don't leave me alone with the night.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.

When Lincoln was thirty-two, he wrote, "I am now the most miserable man living.

The verb "un-man" is defined in a nineteenth-century dictionary as "to break or subdue the manly spirit in; to cause to despond; to dishearten; to make womanish." In other words, there was a sense that truly going off the deep end—being unable to work or function, as happens in the disease of depression—ran contrary to true masculinity.

Perhaps," observes James McPherson, "McClellan's career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility." Lincoln had clearly learned those lessons.

He said gloomily, despairing, sadly: 'How hard, oh, how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived for it.

Here, where the lonely hooting owl Sends forth his midnight moans, Fierce wolves shall o'er my carcase growl, Or buzzards pick my bones. No fellow-man shall learn my fate, Or where my ashes lie; Unless by beasts drawn round their bait, Or by the ravens' cry. Yes! I've resolved the deed to do, And this the place to do it: This heart I'll rush a dagger through Though I in hell should rue it! Often

Most suicidal people don't have a sense of what will come next. In particular, writes Edwin Shneidman, "The idea of Hell does not ordinarily enter into suicide . . . The destination (or concern) is not to go anywhere, except away.