Quotes About Despair

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that's right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn't have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there's eternity in every second we're alive.

Dad, Dad, Dad. What's wrong?" Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was "I—" I— I have made mistakes— I am alone— I am wet— I want to die— I am sorry— I did my best— I love my children— I need your help— I want to die— "I can't be here," he said.

His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.

I was more alone than if I had been alone.

To feel alone is to be alone.

It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live.

Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.

He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

it broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.

I can't live, I've tried and I can't. If that sounds simple, it's simple like a mountain is simple.

She didn't love life. There was no convincing reason to live

His words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

Gut-wrenching questions honor God. Despair directed at God is a way of encountering him, opening ourselves up to the One and only Someone who can actually do something about our plight. And whether we, like Greg, collide with the Almighty or simply bump up against him, we cannot be the same. We never are when we experience God.

He owned a whole world full of memories, of lovely moments relived and happy recollections. I'm not saying he was happy or that he didn't suffer. He suffered very much, but he did not despair; he still drew nourishment from what he had been given. But the sadness never left him. Happiness needs more than memories of the past to feed on; it also needs dreams of the future.

Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past. Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

Misery requires paradises lost