Despair Quotes

We all get in a funk sometimes.It doesn't mean you're failing, or ungrateful, or stupid, or lost. It means you're human.The Funk happens. For all of us. We can’t be happy all the time. We don’t need to be.

~ Scott Stabile

Yet something else trickles in between the cracks of this despairing thought. The hope of something to fill that emptiness. The hope that, perhaps, I have found it already. And suddenly hope is a thing alive, soaring in me. Its wings beat against my ribs, wild with the promise of joy.

~ Ashlee Willis

Hope is a fine killing thing.

~ Kirryn Lia Todd

The only recourse for an escape artist from world affairs is to explore their inner sanctum where hopes, dreams, insecurities, and despair collide.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Regret is the strongest anchor that latches on to the ground, and you carry it within you, it is a feeling quite unlike others for it is despair mingled with hope.

~ Saim .A. Cheeda

I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Rachel L. Schade

So I tried my best to stifle hope. Because hope's twin was despair, and despair was infinitely worse. If hope hurt, then despair was the absence of hurt. It was the absence of feeling. It was the absence of caring. I wanted very much to care.

~ S. Jae-Jones

I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-lifedestroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politicsof despair. This world deserves better.

~ Alexis Shotwell

Hope is a gift we give ourselves in our darkest despair.

~ Jeffrey Fry

No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.

~ Amit Kalantri

With great emptiness and a vacuum none can fill we push on through the shadows, complied to walk in the darkness and never allowed to appreciate it with the hope of a light unseen but we will still get there.

~ Emmoduro

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.

~ Ben Ehrenreich

... What of this despair? I know it all too well... because up until now... I've climbed up, kicked it in it's teeth, and surpassed it... over and over again just to make it to this very moment!

~ Tite Kubo

We carry on not by letting go of the worries that burden us, but by staying true to our hearts & the meaning that surrounds us.

~ Robert Vanleeuwen

Youth, elastic and bright, disdains to be compelled. When conquered, from its very chains it forges implements for freedom; it alights from one baffled flight, only again to soar on untired wing towards some other aim. Previous defeat is made the bridge to pass the tide to another shore; and, if that break down, its fragments become stepping stones. It will feed upon despair, and call it a medicine which is to renovate its dying hopes.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Most times and in most circumstances, what hinders real progress is never anything big, but the small things we least regard that impede real thinking and action for progress!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Jean Rhys

I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

~ David Foster Wallace

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.

~ Julian Barnes

For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.

~ Michael Cox

Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.

~ Stephen R. Lawhead

Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.

~ Leonid Andreyev

A tired man lay down his headin a dusty room so dim,and for so long his wife did shakeand yell to waken him.Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stirof sandy, red bullfights,of powder-blasts in the airand carnival delights.Yet still his wife was in despairin a dusty room so dim,for she knew death was a whorenot far from tempting him.

~ Roman Payne

Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.

~ Simon Armitage

Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.

~ Erin Bow

Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward?How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?

~ Terry Pratchett

Signý knew she would die a thousand deaths upon seeing another woman with him, bearing his children, raising them with him. All the while, Signý, caged in his dungeons, hearing all the painful details of his life with someone else, drowning in her own despair, her love for him turning to hatred. A more tragic life, she could not imagine.

~ Farrah Naseem

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.

~ László Krasznahorkai

Why wait to forgive and let go only after you have sufficiently wallowed in your despair? Why not forgive and let go now?

~ Kamand Kojouri

May we always be burdened with thinking of the suffering of others, for that is what it means to be human.

~ Kamand Kojouri

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

~ T.s. Eliot

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

~ Blaise Pascal

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

~ Ezra Pound

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

~ John Clare

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

~ Sylvia Plath

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

~ Aberjhani