Best 240 quotes in «desperation quotes» category

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.

Neil once told me you had to become a monster so that you didn't become the victim of one instead. I don't care what anyone says. I believe him.

Never act out of desperation.

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.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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

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

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

Once again, I felt as I needed to flee or I’d die. That was how my life was panning 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.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

Once you connect with yourself, it is impossible to be lonely or desperate.

On the one hand you had people constantly fighting Hell; on the other, you had people constantly fighting Hell on earth.

Only a fool would underestimate a man with nothing to lose.

...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.

People who are out of control desperately need to observe your healthy boundaries in-play to learn from your example.

People who get offended by your not saying 'Thank you!' … after they’ve paid you a compliment were merely desperate to be thanked.

People never know what they are capable of until all other options run out.

She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush.

Remember what we wrote? 'And just as I cannot imagine how I survived the past without you... I cannot imagine a future without you.' Remember? Well, I'm the future without her, buddy boy, and I can tell you right now that it's not something you're going to relish.

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

She held the woman's hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they'd first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.

Silently, she wondered whether this was the same desperation, the same impotence that grips many men by their shirts, their T-shirts, their work vests, gripping them equally hard, shaking them and leading them to drink,to beating or the noose. Was this it?

Sometimes your gaze alone scares me. Sometimes I've never seen you before. I no longer know what you're doing here, in this popular seaside resort, in this dull, crowded season, where you are even more alone than in your regional capital. The better to kill you, perhaps, or to drive you away, I don't know. I sometimes manage to feel I've never seen you before. That I don't know you, to the point of horror. That I have no idea why you're here, what you want from me, or what will become of you. Becoming is the only subject we never, ever broach. You must not know what you're doing here either, with this woman who is already old, mad with writing. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it's the same all over; it's nothing, you came simply because you were desperate, as you are every day of your life. And also during certain summers at certain times of day or night when the sun quits the sky and slips into the sea, every evening, always, you cannot help wanting to die. This I know. I see the two of us lost in similar natures. I can sometimes be overwhelmed by tenderness for the kind of people we are. Unstable, they say, a bit nutty. 'People who never go to the movies, or the theater, or parties.' Leftists are like that, you know, they have no clue how to enjoy life. Cannes makes them sick and so do the grand hotels of Morocco. Movies and theaters, it's all the same.

Sometimes we just want to be happy such that we don't care who gets hurt

SONG OF DAWN I saw the sun rise by accident. It was a horrible sight. Annoyed by its splendor, I sought refuge in a moist pillow, and lay there, alone, at the dawn of another day, that brought me closer to another death, pondering the vanity of my solitude, the vanity of procrastination, and the tiresome inevitability of waking up again the same person. It might still be possible to change, but obstinately I remain the same, hoping that others might take solace in my consistency. But perhaps they take no solace in it, perhaps they too find it tedious.

Stay calm and exercise restrain during your most desperate moment or you shall desperately say what when your desperation is over, you shall come to a later realization of what you shouldn’t have say and notice how silence could have been the best option to mere words!

Stop treating your feelings like they are worth so little. I'm your heart, you idiot. Stop treating me like I'm worth so little. Choose me over your brain for once... Please...

Talvez os selvagens nunca abandonem o poder - afirmou Philip com ar de desalento. - Talvez a cobiça nunca deixe de pesar mais nos conselhos dos poderosos que a sabedoria; talvez o medo nunca deixe de vencer a compaixão na mente dum homem com uma espada empunhada.

Such a little child To send to be a priestling... Icy poverty

The desperation in his voice was misplaced and as his eyes danced over my face I knew he was just as broken as I was. That kiss, those caresses—the feeling of his skin against mine had shattered our perfect friendship. There was no turning back now; having him was the only thing that would make me whole.

The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored. She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.

The first woman president has to happen in my lifetime, or I'm going to light this entire planet on fire.

Their desperation must have been great, indeed. Desperation or greed. Is there a difference? Some days, I cannot tell.

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.

The labyrinth was dirty, constricting. The smell of wet and rotted vines littered the air, making his tentative hands twitch and curl with desperation. How he wished to be free again! To feel the glaciers melt into springs and witness the stars turn themselves over and over again under his fingertips.

The person who tries to place you in the darkness they live in has reached full blown distress. This is the saddest part of their situation. They are about to give up. Instead of reaching for help, they reach for company so they’re not alone.

The "more" of Christianity is a myth; a deceitful illusion designed to keep you busy and running in circles, always seeking but never finding, always learning but never coming to the knowledge of the Truth—a carrot on a stick, if you will.

The only thing that keeps me going, is the desire to get away as far as possible.

There's the thing with girls, isn't it?', he'd said. 'Whenever they stand on the edge of something, you can't help it, you can't. You think, push. That's all it would take. Just one little push.

There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.

There is greater clarity in the still waters of sadness, something not found in the babbling brooks of more sought after emotions.

There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-

There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

There is no such thing as a boring person when you are lonely or extremely bored.

The Spirit of your child bewails the dead, and mingles with the dead—dead hopes, dead fancies, dead imaginings of youth,’ returned the Bell, ‘but she is living. Learn from her life, a living truth. Learn from the creature dearest to your heart, how bad the bad are born. See every bud and leaf plucked one by one from off the fairest stem, and know how bare and wretched it may be. Follow her! To desperation!