Quotes About Despair

I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

I didn't get anything from holding onto those handles," Rick said. "Mercer talked to me but it didn't help. He doesn't know any more than I do. He's just an old man climbing a hill to his death." "Isn't that the revelation?" Rick said, "I have that revelation already.

After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen God.

Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.

And I finally found a setting for despair." Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. "So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who's smart has emigrated, don't you think?

to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A recording. A closed loop of tape.

One more in a long line, a dreary entity among many others like him, an almost endless number of brain-damaged retards. Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind—everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate or not.

I finally found a setting for despair…So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything...

So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair. Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who's small has emigrated, don't you think?

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth.

But a mood like that, Rick said, you're apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

Jack thought, And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.

Aimer un esprit, voilà le véritable martyre. Le désespoir incarné. Le nom de Donna ne serait imprimé sur aucune page, il n'apparaîtrait nulle part dans les annales de l'humanité. Disparue sans laisser d'adresse. Il y a des filles comme ça, et c'est celles-là qu'on aime le plus, celles qui ne permettent pas d'espérer, car elles vous échappent alors même que vous refermer vos bras autour d'elles.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.

Only death can get us out of this and maybe not even death. Maybe it's too late; we'll carry this deterioration with us to the next life.

But a mood like that," Rick said, "you're apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

It was a scene of ruin and despair, and of a ponderous, timeless, inertial heaviness.

D is for Substance D. D is dumbness, and despair, desertion-desertion of you from your friends, your friends from you, everyone from everyone. Isolation and loneliness... and hating and suspecting each other, D is finally death. Slow death from the head down. Well... that's it.

What a way to live a life; what, as the other officer said just now, an endless nothing.

Not an encouraging thought. Whatever thing, object, or event had at any time in her fifty-odd years stirred the smooth surface of her vapid enjoyment was gently eased out of existence. He could guess a few. Garbage men who rattled cans. Door-to-door salesmen. Bills and tax forms of all kinds. Crying babies (perhaps all babies). Drunks. Filth. Poverty. Suffering in general. It was a wonder anything was left.

Already Sam Regan could feel the power of the drug wearing off; he felt weak and afraid and bitterly sickened at the realization. So goddamn soon, he said to himself. All over; back to the hovel, to the pit in which we twist and cringe like worms in a paper bag, huddled away from the daylight.