Best 240 quotes in «desperation quotes» category

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

I believe in love and I believe that a healthy love stems from love for oneself, so it is never desperate, even in the worst event, in which the other leaves us sorry to die in the fullness of love, a true feeling turns that into energy to go forward with joy and even more strength than before. True love leaves no room for despair, true love is beyond hope.

I didn't forget you. I'm just desperate to move on.

I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.

I don't have anything to give you, except to show you a way to better yourself.

I fear that one day I will no longer understand desperation, and with that, I will slowly stop listening to what others have to say.

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know." Zagreus smiled. "You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.

I had nothing to prove and everything to lose. But it didn’t take love to sacrifice something of yourself for someone else. It just took desperation.

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.

If you were mine, I'd never leave you, Prudence. I couldn't.

If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.

If the sea could speak, he thought blindly, it would be screaming at him

I kept a record of my periods, and would ask for the next meeting to be on the full moon, in my apartment. Most of them responded with a nervous negative, and the reason wasn't that they considered my proposition peculiar; it was because I blurted it out as if I was playing Russian roulette. And because of my bulging red-faced blondeness, my coming-apart-at-the-seams ways of speaking, and a pair of eyes whose futile, terrifying shipwreck said it all.

I know what it's like to desperately need help, and what I think is it would feel really good to be on the other side, to be able to give help to people who need it, desperately or otherwise.

I just want to know if I can go to Heaven. That's all I want in life, salvation in the next.

I know the hard ground and the taste of the salt water I’m made of and the way even getting out of bed feels impossible some days. I know how some moments there’s not even enough air. I know the desperate and the bargains you want to make with the universe and every last prayer you’ve prayed to gods you don’t even believe in. But stupid? No, love. Not stupid. Not you. You are infinitely, impossibly, beautifully human.

In the better light of the living room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.

I'll go this minute!' Of course, I remained.

Inside the maize mill, the owners no longer had any use for a broom. The hungry people kept the floors cleaner than a wet mop. At the beginning of the month, the mill was packed full of those waiting for fallen scraps. The crowd would part long enough to allow women to pass with their pails of grain. As the machine rumbled and spit a white cloud of flour into the pails, the multitude of old people, women, and children watched intently with eyes dancing like butterflies. Once the pail was pulled away, they themselves on hands and knees and scooped the floor clean. Afterward, old women would rattle their walking sticks up inside the grinder as if ringing a bell, collecting the loose flour that drifted to the floor.

In troubled times one wishes for a sound sleep more than usual, but, realizing its amplified importance, sleep smugly impedes all attempts to woo it.

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist.

I think our last kiss was meant to be quick and chaste, but after the first touch of his lips fire leaped up and roared through my belly. My fingers yanked him close, digging into his back, and his arms crushed me to him as if wanting to meld us together. I knotted my fingers in his hair and bit down on his bottom lip, making him groan. His lips parted, and my tongue swept in to dance with his. There was nothing sweet or gentle in our last kiss; it was filled with sorrow and desperation, of the bitter knowledge that we could've had something perfect, but it just wasn't meant to be.

it was times like these when a man in a desperate situation must take whatever madness is offered to escape the darker madness in which he finds himself trapped.

It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends

I turned back looking far away not making contact with anyone and I paced to my room with tears in my eyes, solitude in my heart and nuisance in my mind. I locked my door, rested in bed and slept while still desperate.

I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.

I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that's it. I'm awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

I want to feel embarrassed by my desperation but I’m too busy feeling desperate.

I wasn’t old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he’d never have to love her again.

I was shaking so hard, I could barely get the door unlocked. I just got the door shut behind me when I sank to my knees and fell apart. I cried so hard I was nearly convulsing. I had never felt such raw emotions in my life. I felt like someone had ripped my heart out of my chest and tore it to pieces. I curled into a ball on the floor and tried desperately to disappear. But no matter how small I got, I was still here. I still existed. And for a short while, I thought I had mattered to someone. I guess I was wrong. I mattered to no one.

I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.

I was wrong, Gabby, and I'll apologize for it forever if you want me to. But the truth is I couldn't face you. If I came to you and you sent me away, if I knew for certain that you didn't want me anymore...God in heaven, Gabriella Waverly, I've never been so bloody afraid of a lass before.

Women are dangerous, they stop at nothing and they never let go.

Loneliness and desperation are only possible when we have lost touch with our beauty within.

Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.

Maybe it is desperation," I say. "Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love." He looks at me, and in the sunlight his eyes come alive with greens and golds. "Sometimes we can," he says.

Marena looked at all of them out of her big, calm, shining eyes. "Love is no nonsense," she said. "It has to come.

Never act out of desperation.

My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup.

Neil said to me once that in times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision. It's your choice, he said. Us or them. So choose.

New rules—we needed new rules. No one opens the main doors but me. No one leaves the property without me. No one goes outside without letting me know. I had these horrible images in my head of kids being restrained against their wills, of kids crying my name out, begging me to help them when I was powerless. Desperate times… Lord, my soul called out. Lord…somehow that’s as far as I could get. I didn’t have the words.

No, if your life is without pain and anger and desperation then you are living it all wrong. You are not living at all.

No healthy mind could bring itself to torture another human being.

Obsession and desperation for your goal, gets you the goal.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's: It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.

Oh God, what's wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out?

Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.