logo

Quotes About Despair

There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
But Alma thought it would kill her, this profundity of sorrow. She could not sound out the bottom of it. She had been sinking into it for a year and a half, and feared she would sink forevermore. She cried herself out on Hanneke's neck, sobbing forth the harvest of her long-darkened spirits. She must have poured a tankard of tears down Hanneke's bosom, but Hanneke did not move or speak, except to repeat, "There, there, child. It will not kill you.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
The best thing for me to do right now, I thought, would be to never have been born.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is a silent, blank page.
~ Elizabeth Kostova
People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is silent, a blank page.
~ Elizabeth Kostova
Of death I am as certain as any mortal, Ammerlin, but defeat is certain only in despair.
~ Elizabeth Moon
Of death I am as certain as any mortal, Ammerlin, but defeat is certain only in despair. And I have been well taught that in the worst of times despair is still the work of evil.
~ Elizabeth Moon
Lady Baskerville paced up and down wringing her hands. She required only an armful of weedy flowers to make a somewhat mature Ophelia.
~ Elizabeth Peters
For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.
~ Elizabeth von Arnim
Hemingway has his classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, Gradually, then suddenly. That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I'm being drowned by some kind of black wave.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together- the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night- can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out. But that was long ago.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
It didn't and doesn't turn out well. There is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It's only a matter of how long you can live with it.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I hated him for not being depressed. He seemed a fool-- everyone who didn't feel like me was a fool. I alone knew the truth about life, knew that it was all a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit to or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I refuse to get better. I only hope that whatever pill she gives me makes me feel well enough to plot my own end, to gather the medicines or other methods of destruction in order to make this suicide a success and not just one more wimpy attempt by another hysterical girls who wants help. Because I don't want their fucking help anymore.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
that I don't want to feel better in the morning, how that way of life is wearing me out, that what I really want is to not feel this way in the first place.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I had tried so hard for so many years to turn all my despair into sexual abandon, I wanted so much to stop being me and start being someone else's toy, but I didn't have it in me.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
I know I want out of this mess. I want out. No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all. Nothing will work out. The promise that on the other side of depression lies a beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel