Quotes About Despair

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City Hotel.

joy runs deeper than despair.

Someone's elbow dug into my back, another woman's feet were two inches from my face. How was it possible, packed so close, to be so utterly and miserably alone?

She sat on the toilet and cradled her aborted baby, as if it were alive. And her eyes were like an endless well where you could not see the bottom.

She sat on the toilet and cradled the miscarriage her husband beat out of her, as if it was alive. And her eyes were like an endless well where you could not see the bottom.

Laughter separates us from despair, and gives us a chance at love.

My world fell away from me. Agony stabbed my chest.

This dread is lousy. When it hits, it's like someone has turned the dial that controls gravity. Everything sinks hard and cold and fast/ It winds you. It's that same feeling, that same sad panic you confront when you can't sleep, when your mind wanders and you remind yourself, for no reason at all, that you're going to die one day. That you will end, you will be buried and forgotten. And everything and everyone you know and remember and love will be void.

The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn't take.

Mirrors are for misery, nothing more...they record decay.

He says that hope is a very, very fragile thing and that when you steal it from someone, it can be like stealing their soul. He's convinced that taking away hope is much worse than giving someone the truth, and that those were the alternatives he was forced to choose between.

The shelf held nothing of value and it held everything of value. It was the past they'd both endured and escaped. It was despair and hope. It was life and death.

How many bad things can happen to a person..." Lewis asked, musing, "before they start to lose their soul?

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.

But there is nothing in me, just fear, nothing but the running of dark waves.

I said so little. Days were short. Short days. Short nights. Short years. I said so little. I couldn't keep up. My heart grew weary From joy, Despair, Ardor, Hope. The jaws of Leviathan Were closing upon me. Naked, I lay on the shores Of desert islands. The white whale of the world Hauled me down to its pit. And now I don't know What in all that was real.

Though not for certain, perhaps in some other year, It shall come to completion in the sixth millennium, or next Tuesday. The demiurge's workshop will suddenly be stilled. Unimaginable silence. And the form of every single grain will be restored in glory. I was judged for my despair because I was unable to understand this.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

In 1942 in Warsaw, we were living without hope, or rather on a hope we knew to be a delusion.

Kad nusinuodytum žiurknuodžiais, reikia prarasti bet koki? vilt? ir drauge visiškai pasiduoti savo mintims, tada jos užstoja vis? pasaul? ir žmogus ni?nieko neberegi, išskyrus savo likim?.

Sometimes the world loses its face. it becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different. When I wrote...that I accepted the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations.