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Quotes About Despair

I am as one who is left alone at a banquet, the lights dead and the flowers faded.
~ Edward George, Baron George
Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.
~ Daniel Keyes
I am nothing. I'm like someone who's been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.
~ Haruki Murakami
"I was not alone when I was in Goofy hell"
~ Aristotle
Despair is anger with no place to go.
~ Mignon McLaughlin
A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.
~ Wendell Berry
the modern world abounds with heralds of a better future and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeats was silly like us or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress--and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please.
~ Wendell Berry
Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
~ Wendell Berry
I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments ?
~ Werner Heisenberg
In a darkened world no longer illuminated by the light of this center [God], technical advances are scarcely more than despairing attempts to make Hell a more agreeable place to live in. This must be particularly emphasized against those who think that by spreading the civilization of science and technology even to the uttermost ends of the earth, they can furnish all the essential preconditions for a golden age. One cannot escape the Devil so easily as that.
~ Werner Heisenberg
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander, Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
~ Wilfred Owen
The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet, came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves, too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me. Would other men have remembered that in my place? Not if they loved her as I did.
~ Wilkie Collins
He was an object to laugh at - he was an object to weep over. His enemies, if a creature so wretched could have had enemies, would have forgiven him, on seeing him in his new dress. His friends - had any of his friends been left - would have been less distressed if they had looked at him in his coffin, than if they had looked at him as he was now.
~ Wilkie Collins
Sen yan?mda olmad???ndan ölmek karar?m, daha doÄŸrusu yaÅŸamaya kar?? duyduÄŸum nefret deÄŸiÅŸmeden, bütün gücüyle sürüp gidiyor.
~ Wilkie Collins
Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
~ Will Durant
These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope--these lofty city spires or simple chapels in the hills--they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know, but as long as men suffer, those steeples will remain
~ Will Durant
The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not by reason.
~ Will Durant
with the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings
~ Will Self
a bonnet full of black feathers, as if a raven had wandered onto her hat and died of pure wretchedness.
~ Will Thomas
If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
~ William Blake
Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness - done down by the haphazard, yet again.
~ William Boyd
This cackit place ... They poor darkies. A greeshie way to go. He clenched his fists. I'm a snool, a glaikit sumph. Nocht but rain, howdumdied all day o'boot. I've lost my noddle. Camsteerie bloody country. He gave a harsh laugh. No strunt. Any haughmagandie? Never. Dunged into the ground. ... I could greet I tell you ... He could only understand one word in three, but this time he knew how the little man felt.
~ William Boyd
As I write this I feel that draining hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It's at these moments that we know we are going to die.
~ William Boyd
So most of my life has been lived in hell.
~ William Carlos Williams