Quotes About Despair

The world is full of interiors that bleach the spirit. Hospitals, police stations, job centres, local government offices and prisons all have their own subtle type of vampire colour scheme and black-hole furnishing, capable by accident or design of wiping away a person's self-esteem and will to resist, like boiled-over soup off a ceramic hob.

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day.

These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.

Just a dead kid in the park, one more sign that the world had lost its mind.

Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.

despair is ultimately destructive to oneself and a burden to others; and that if one persists in it, the gods will sooner or later lose patience and give one something to really despair about.

for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds? cooled ?and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. it was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has "legs," so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it.

Sitting on the train to Atlanta, Frank suddenly realized that those memories, powerful as they were, did not crush him anymore or throw him into paralyzing despair. He could recall every detail, every sorrow, without needing alcohol to steady him. Was this the fruit of sobriety?

nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too. There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject – advertisement. The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy.

It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart

The constantness, varietylessness, the sheer weight of sameness drove him to despair and froze his imagination. To be required to sleep with the same woman forever was a curious and unnatural idea to him; to be expected to dredge up enthusiasms for old acts, and routine ploys; he wondered at the arrogance of the female.

You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children.

His business was dread. People came to him in dread, whispered in dread, wept and pleaded in dread. And dread was what he counseled.