Quotes About Despair

Running away from the ghost of depression can also be a tonic. Frightened of being immobilized by despair, depressives often fling themselves into frantic activity. Hoping to keep the gloom at bay, they work until they drop, seem to have inhuman stores of energy, and create art nonstop. They can't afford to stop. If they slow down, the missile of depression might catch up with them.

Most people think it's normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul.

They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

What's the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person's despair?

She's not coming back. No. He knew it was true. He had the feeling that the world might easily stop turning without the girl in it. Every hour was arduous, and when it was over, you had to start again with a new one, no better. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it going.

She stares up- and downriver in search of something. Something she longs for. Something she has been expecting every day, and every day it doesn't come, and still she waits and still she looks and still she yearns, but the hope dwindles with every day that passes. Now she waits hopelessly.

Stifling hope is a hopeless business.

Can you imagine what this old Negro had to go through? Can you imagine the day a Negro woman went to a black man and said: "Honey, I'm pregnant," and both of them fell on their knees and prayed that their baby would be born deformed? Can you imagine what this Negro went through, hoping his baby is born crippled? Because if he was born crippled, he would have less chance of being a slave and more chance of having freedom.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool.

How can you explain that it's just that he was sad, that he'd been sad all his life, and he knew he'd always be sad?

A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.

piles of underpants, shirts and outer clothing. . . . Three men were shooting like robots, their eyes were empty, with a cadaverous glassy shine. . . .

Well, I don't believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.' Though

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She'd learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quiet frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?

Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.