Best 1597 quotes in «despair quotes» category

You when the storm is raging - how do you face despair? It is you that the world discovers, whatever the clothes you wear.

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

A big part of dealing with depression is realizing that you are in control of your own happiness.

A blessed hope, a blessed life.

Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.

A brutal, relentless self-analysis lies at the heart of all despair.

Adding to my emotional dizziness on Sunday, I spoke with my sister, who kept noting how amazing Michael is, and what a brave and selfless man he is for having helped as he did.

A desperate plea to the Trinity is not something you can just apologize for in the morning -Drunk Dialing the Divine

A desperate soul needs a good and inspiring music

Adversity begets spirituality.

Adversity tests the limit of your strength.

Adversity tests what the soul can endure.

A few minutes later, my eyes began to feel a bit droopy, but I vaguely noticed that Anissa was whispering something.

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair Of not being able to express With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout, The bleeding of my heart.

Ah yes—could it really be said that people who had no hope in their hearts were alive? Sina thought not. Well, of course they ‘jogged along,’ as she expressed it; they could do that all right; but actually what Sina called life—that she did not think was to be found in those who had nothing to hope for. This was Clever Sina’s opinion on the subject.

A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.

Alan McCluskey “Despair is an ugly thing when it refuses hope.

Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies!

All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.

All experiences are preordained by the Creator.

All great men remain undeterred during dark times.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn't go on if you didn't hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away.

... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always "frontal" lobotomy;but was there any other kind?Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about.Some answer or trick of the will:the ability not to think about it.What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?He tended to conceptualize some ultimate,platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed,tembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability.He frequently had this feeling:What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people?What if he was simply ill-suited,the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs?The neurology of failure.What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair,and all his so called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?...

Although secular fundamentalist “progressives” might believe in a future “golden age,” such an age does not exist. The future that they herald is merely one of gathering gloom and ever darkening clouds. This fate has ever been so for those who proclaim their “Pride.” They have nothing to expect in the future but their fall. As for the Christian, he has nothing to fear but his falling into the pride of despair. If he avoids becoming despondent and retains his humility, he will receive the gift of hope which is its fruit. Where there is hope there is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anger is distress.

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

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.

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.

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.