Quotes About Despair

It's a pathetic thing, hope, hard to kill.

The world fell out of love with love at some point

Not long ago I heard a woman in her ninth month of sobriety say that before she quit drinking, she had only two emotions, anxiety and despair. "Now I have, like, too many to count," she said, "and some of them suck, but some of them are really, really good." Almost everyone in the room knew what she meant.

And why not—whatever despair we may feel concerning resurrection and reassemblage—find comic relief in the human determination to assert wholeness in the face of inevitable decay and fragmentation?

Yet every time I saw Arthur my heart sank.

You are always asking me why the people don't do something, why they put up with this brutality, why they don't rise up against it, this and that. Okay. You're exhausted, you're shocked, you're sick to your stomach, and you feel dirty. These things are what people feel every day here—and you expect them to get themselves organized? You expect them to fight back? Could you fight back at this moment?

Because for most of us, suicide is a moment we'll never choose. It's only for people like Lexy, who know they might choose eventually, who believe they have a choice to make.

she wondered what she had done to deserve the loneliness that seemed to surround her.

It's as if I tripped and almost fell into my own grave. My only intent was to feel better—which is to say, not to feel at all.

Everyone else in the family was married, but she was single and alone, unchosen and unloved.

He wasn't physically impotent. So the impotence must lie in his soul. Finding oblivion in a moment's ecstasy was all he could manage.

Loss was a night that never ended.

They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them.

When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.

Despair and Genius are too oft connected

Was ever grief like mine?

Fay, there are only two types of blacks ever released from these places, the Carters and the broken men. The broken men are so damaged that they will never again be suitable members of any sort of social unit. Everything that was still good when they entered the joint, anything inside of them that may have escaped the ruinous effects of black colonial existence, anything that may have been redeemable when they first entered the joint—is gone when they leave.

Indecision leads to inaction, which leads to low energy, depression, despair.

I bitterly recalled that I had no arms.

It's hard to love There's so much to hate Hanging on to hope When there is no hope to speak of And the wounded skies above Say it's much too late So maybe we should all be praying for time

Yet even so the darkness thickened, until it covered his eyes and filled his nose and stopped his ears, so he could not see or smell or hear or run, and the grey cliffs were gone and the dead horse was gone and his brother was gone and all was black and still and black and cold and black and dead and black…

He himself would have had only the courage to live on, feeling death creep in closer year by year as once the darkness had crept in from the corners of the room when the lights were failing. ... He had known despair, but now he knew hope. He looked forward with confidence to the time when the sun would again be setting at the southern end of its long arc... It was not finished. The thing would go on.

For though despair is often close at hand, it never triumphs, and through all the story runs, a sustaining bond, the primal force which humanity shares with all earthly creatures, the sheer will to live.

I am become a sour woman, Catelyn thought. I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.