Best 1597 quotes in «despair quotes» category

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    Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy. The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions.

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    An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

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    And it didn't matter. It wouldn't make a fucking difference if I dropped to the floor and started crying like a baby. No point in panicking. No point in breaking. No point in anything at all.

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    And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.

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    And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.

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    And much like the despairity of the woman who can never bear children, my dreams can never bear fruit. They are the mountains I can never climb. The hurdles I can never leap. The seas I can never cross. The skies I can never look up to. Yet, I adopt them. Unblemished. Guilt-free.

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    And now, for something completely the same: Wasted time and wasted breath, 's what I'll make, until my death. Helping people 'd be as good, but I wouldn't, if I could. For the few that help deserve, have no need, or not the nerve, help from strangers to accept, plus from mine a few have wept. Wept from joy, or from despair, or just from my vengeful stare. Ways I have, to look at stupid, make them see I am not Cupid. Make them see they are in error, for of truth I am a bearer. Most decide I'm just a bear, mauling at them, - like I care.

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    And she would like to cry, but she is unable to; and she would like to disappear but she won't; and she would like to stop feeling this despair and so she thinks that she will go to the movies see friends shop eat barter fuck the neighbor's husband: she is like a sow in her mud (of loneliness) and covers herself in it and what of it--it is the disease of her country, and the late night television shows the magazines and movies in cheap collusion with it.

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    And so, when the chips are down, I must say, though not without a sense of repugnance, that if you wish to show your belief in democracy, you also have to do so when you are in the minority, convinced both intellectually and, not least, in your innermost self, that the majority, in the name of democracy, is crushing everything you stand for and that means something to you, indeed, all that gives you the strength to endure, well, that gives a kind of meaning to your life, something that transcends your own fortuitous lot, one might say. When the heralds of democracy roar, triumphantly bawling out their vulgar victories day after day so that it really makes you suffer, as in my own case, you still have to accept it; I will not let anything else be said about me, he thought.

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    And then Elena's dog at her bacon. She had heated up a slice of bacon on a paper towel, put it on the table, and turned to open the fridge. The dog swallowed the bacon and the paper towel. She stared at the dog, its expression smug, and all the frustrations of her life boiled up in her head. A dog eating her bacon, a dog eating her bacon while she was jobless.

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    And that's all. That's it. The courage, the recklessness, call it what you will, is the flash, the instant of sublimation; then flick! the old darkness again. That's why. It's too strong for steady diet. And if it were a steady diet, it would not be a flash, a glare. And so, being momentary, it can be preserved and prolonged only on paper: a picture, a few written words that any match, a minute and harmless flame that any child can engender, can obliterate in an instant. A one-inch sliver of sulphur-tipped wood is longer than memory or grief; a flame no larger than a sixpence is fiercer than courage or despair.

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    And then Elena's dog ate her bacon. She had heated up a slice of bacon on a paper towel, put it on the table, and turned to open the fridge. The dog swallowed the bacon and the paper towel. She stared at the dog, its expression smug, and all the frustrations of her life boiled up in her head. A dog eating her bacon, a dog eating her bacon while she was jobless.

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    And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle’s hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth. Pierre-Jean drew back and stood mesmerized. The room around Fin stirred as every ear bent to the ring of heartsong. It rushed through Fin and spread to the outermost and tiniest capillary reaches of her body. Her flesh sang. The hairs of her arms and neck roused and stood. She sped the bow across the strings. Her fingers danced on the fingerboard quick as fat raindrops. Every man in the room that night would later swear that there was a wind within it. They would tell their children and lovers that a hurricane had filled the room, toppled chairs, driven papers and sheets before it and blew not merely around them but through them, taking fears, grudges, malice, and contempt with it, sending them spiraling out into the night where they vanished among the stars like embers rising from a bonfire. And though the spirited cry of the fiddle’s song blew through others and around the room and everything in it, Fin sat at the heart of it. It poured into her. It found room in the closets and hollow places of her soul to settle and root. It planted seeds: courage, resolve, steadfastness. Fin gulped it in, seized it, held it fast. She needed it, had thirsted for it all her days. She saw the road ahead of her, and though she didn’t understand it or comprehend her part in it, she knew that she needed the ancient and reckless power of a holy song to endure it. She didn’t let the music loose. It buckled and swept and still she clung to it, defined it in notes and rhythm, channeled it like a river bound between mountain steeps. And a thing happened then so precious and strange that Fin would ever after remember it only in the formless manner of dreams. The song turned and spoke her name—her true name, intoned in a language of mysteries. Not her earthly name, but a secret word, defining her alone among all created things. The writhing song spoke it, and for the first time, she knew herself. She knew what it was to be separated out, held apart from every other breathing creature, and known. Though she’d never heard it before and wouldn’t recall it after, every stitch of her soul shook in the passage of the word, shuddered in the wake of it, and mourned as the sound sped away. In an instant, it was over. The song ended with the dissonant pluck of a broken string.

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    And then I realized that the close people to my heart, are actually the ones who hurt me the most.

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    And the world suddenly appeared to me as such an awfully large place, with I so totally alone in it that I could have cried from the bottom of my heart.

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    And when hope returns to us, it will be with a passion and power to match every ounce of this crushing despair and pain, every fiery shred of determination that carried us when hope failed. It will claim us with a courage that will make the goddess herself quake and doubt herself.

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    And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building. I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

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    Angels should never be exposed to the dire darkness of despair in the tunnel of cosmic nothingness, and although I never believed such maddening thoughts; I couldn't help but feel spiritual in her presence.

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    Anger is distress.

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    An ounce of hope shields you from a ton of despair.

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    A person changes in two ways: inspiration or despair. However, by choosing one of the two, you will make the commitment to go all the way, having a purpose for something, increasing goals, and adjusting for mistakes.

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    As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.

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    Aren't you going to try to talk me out of this?" Maurice asked. "Ask if I'm really up for it?" "No. Maybe this is the last thing you do. Maybe you make a complete recovery. Does it matter? I mean, in the long run?" "No.

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    As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I'd realised I'd not even be kissing myself; I'd be kissing the mirror.

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    Ashtadukht slumped and let the nightingale’s song flood her brain. She knew that empty tone, that defeated outlook; she knew it intimately. Even now, it burned in her as limply as a snuffed flame. Passion burned with unchecked verve, devoured its fuel, and sputtered out. Despair required no upkeep; it heaped barely-glowing coals in the back of your mind and fuelled itself.

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    As I walk I mediate on the word of God. It comforts me.

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    As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned.

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    At crossroad, God is our guide post. He points the right path.

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    As long as you call on God, He will answer you.

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    As soon as whatever provisional well of confidence dries up, I will feel like a frightened motherless child. And I will—what? Lessee, I'll beg friends to assure me I'm fascinating, that my soul is complex so I can once more conduce to irony. An abyss opens up.

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    As you say, I can feel it and I can smell it, but for me it's still a black rose.

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    A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.

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    A tired man lay down his head in a dusty room so dim, and for so long his wife did shake and yell to waken him. Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stir of sandy, red bullfights, of powder-blasts in the air and carnival delights. Yet still his wife was in despair in a dusty room so dim, for she knew death was a whore not far from tempting him.

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    At night I no longer dreamed, nor did I let my imagination work during the day. The once vibrant escapes of watching myself fly through the clouds in bright blue costumes, were now a thing of the past. When I fell asleep, my soul became consumed in a black void. I no longer awoke in the mornings refreshed; I was tired and told myself that I had one day less to live in this world. I shuffled through my chores, dreading every moment of every day. With no dreams, I found that words like hope and faith were only letters, randomly put together into something meaningless - words only for fairy tales.

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    At the dawn of light, the darkness diminishes.

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    At the top of the page I wrote my full name [...] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." And then as I looked at this sentence a great deal of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur.

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    Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one's personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal.

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    At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets.

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    At the crossroad, may God point the straight path for your journey.

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    Avoidance therapy does not work. One major reason for that is because Avoidance Therapy (diversion, think yourself happy, positive affirmations) is predicated on the validity of 'Failure of Will.' Depression is not a choice.

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    Aynayı bıraktı. Kırk iki yıl kalmıştı! Kırk iki yıl daha nasıl dayanacaktı? Kırk iki yıl daha yılların geçmesini bekleyecekti. Kırk iki yıl daha yaşlanan gözlerine bakacaktı. Zaman hapishanesinden kaçmanın bir yolu yok muydu? Ah, keşke tekrar en baştan başlayabilseydi! Ama nasıl? Nereden? Kiminle? Bertha ile olmazdı. O özgürdü istediği zaman onun hapishanesine girip çıkar ya da uçup gidebilirdi. Üstelik onunla asla “biz” olunamazdı; “bizim” yaşamımız, “bizim” yeni yaşamımız mümkün olamazdı.

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    Dolor I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplicaton of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.

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    Battering down doors, battering down people, kicking in doors, kicking in people, searching for her, searching for me.

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    Berani lihat? Berani bayangkan? bagaimana diri kalian yang telah hancur dikoyak kesedihan itu berwujud.. berani bayangkan? Wajah lelah penuh luka yang telah habis disayati sembilu itu berupa. Melihat dirimu mati setiap malam untuk terlahir kembali esok pagi sebagai anak haram kebahagiaan.. Hidup hanya mengajarkan 1 hal, tidak lebih. Ia mengajarkan dengan baik tentang apa itu ‘kehilangan’.

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    Because I know this feeling sweeping through me all too well, the feeling that all my effort, all I have worked for, means nothing. That everything and everyone is a lie. That all is cruel and unforgiving and that there is no justice.

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    Being sad is normal. It's despair that is the enemy. Despair is like a badly sealed window. It allows all manner of things to leak inside. That's what it means to be haunted. To be cursed. It's when something takes root in the soul, the way mold can take root in the walls.

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    Be not in despair; let those tears of sadness grow into flowers.

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    Be patient and endure the times. Your glorious days shall come to pass.

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    Be strong. You will overcome the challenge.

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    Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow. This is the way the world ends. from "The Hollow Man