Quotes About Despair

To quote the poets... we're fucked.

There are days when everything feels like a metaphor for your having died There are days when nothing does

How long is long in a hellish place?

God can inject hope into a absolutely hopeless situation.

This is not a happy story, it doesn't begin or end well, and the middle is equally dreadful.

This proves I'm totally worthless" leads to despair and loss of confidence, while "I can't stand when I act that way" can lead to wisdom and determination.

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

The mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison the abode of Spirit death that it is for over a million men and women now held in U.S. hell holes.

A few of the confined, especially with succor from the outside as well as inside, will tap the grandeur of mind and spirit to fight off this spirit death and guard their humanity. Many others, though, will descend into the hellhole of prison-life to become themselves, even if released, a hell-making force. Or perhaps as is even more frequent, they remain so steeped in trauma and the prison's pervasive dread that they are without resources for life when released. They

It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot...or cosmic rays or a power ring...Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.

Wraiths see death in everything. They do not see things in the physical world as they appear, but as they someday will be. A person about to die might appear cadaverous, with hollow eyes and jaundiced skin; a car destined to crash will appear dented in advance. Much of the world seems decayed, a near collapse. Billboards are tattered, roads are potholed, pain is peeling, metal is rusting, buildings are crumpling. To the Restless, much of the world is already dead.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

The marathon lane is largely empty, mostly silent: the road of the damned rather than the saved.

Downer: When the searing prose of the night before reads so bleakly pedestrian in the cold light of morning

Everything you do, everything you'll ever accomplish, your life's work, your kids' life's work: horseshit. (Ecclesiastes) [God Is Disappointed in You]

For once I myself saw with my own eyes      the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage,          and when the boys said to her,              Ã¢â'¬Å"Sibyl what do you want?"          she replied, "I want to die." T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

It's like waiting for a roller coaster but with only misery ahead and no thrill.

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldn't bear to call it right.

If we lose love, all is lost.

in a matter of seconds, his faith in God, in life, in love, and in a better tomorrow drained away to empty.

In early February 2006, I was forty-seven and at the lowest point of my life.

Lord save us all from... a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.