Despair Quotes

Need will send you even into the arms of your enemy

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Better to rest in peace than rot in pieces

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

The Wind Will Carry UsIn my night, so brief, alasThe wind is about to meet the leaves.My night so brief is filled with devastating anguishHark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?This happiness feels foreign to me.I am accustomed to despair.Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?There, in the night, something is happeningThe moon is red and anxious.And, clinging to this roofThat could collapse at any moment,The clouds, like a crowd of mourning women,Await the birth of the rain.One second, and then nothing.Behind this window,The night tremblesAnd the earth stops spinning.Behind this window, a strangerWorries about me and you.You in your greenery,Lay your hands – those burning memories –On my loving hands.And entrust your lips, replete with life's warmth,To the touch of my loving lipsThe wind will carry us!The wind will carry us!

~ Forough Farrokhzad

Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness―the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness―of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.

~ Guy De Maupassant

When the mainstay of one's world is taken away, it's only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can. He shook his head sorrowfully. But no one can ever go back to yesterday.

~ Robin Hobb

I asked a man who took a death boat to Europe across the treachelous waters of the Mediterranean from LibyaWhy are you taking this death boat. I am already dead. He said. This is my coffin. If I succeed to get to the other side, I get a new life. If I fail, I loose nothing. I remain what I am now: Dead.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

My life has become like a bus, and I'm just watching it pass by

~ Evy Michaels

History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ The Briefcase

~ Rebecca Makkai

The night sky alternated between black and bursts of colour. My stomach wanted food. My limbs wanted rest. My brain wanted sleep. My mind wanted oblivion.

~ Srijita Sarkar

A hopeless man is a very desperate and dangerous man, almost a dead man.

~ Robert F. Kennedy

We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.

~ Miriam Toews

...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

~ Alison Croggon

The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.

~ Andrew Holleran

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair…Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The sky and the sun are always there. It's the clouds that come and go.

~ Rachel Joyce

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold, his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not.

~ Upton Sinclair

I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finney. “They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why?” “You were free.” “I was free. Milton was right…the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now.

~ Louise Penny

I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities.The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bimbos floating around in an inexplicable mix of vacuity and despair. The crumbling face of my building looked pretty enough from across the street, but from here I could see how worn it was. I peeled off a satisfying chunk of paint, cement and matter. And I let it fall to the street below.

~ Nasri Atallah

... I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

~ Marcel Proust

We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.

~ Danielle Collobert

Despair sees no hope, while hope sees no despair.

~ Jim George

Despair is something horribly simple.

~ Christopher Isherwood

Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune’s slings and arrows.

~ Rick Yancey

education without inspiration is only recipe for desperation

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

~ Angela Carter

I’ll live out my whole life as a voice with no one listening.

~ Tom Deaderick

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

~ Albert Einstein

There had come to him one of those moments of quiet despair that lie in wait for even the happiest. Stealthy-footed they leap upon us, as we walk along the street, as we sit at evening with fruit and wine upon the table and laughter on our lips, as we wake suddenly from sleep in the hour before dawn; neither at our work nor our play nor our prayers are we safe, those moments can leap at any time out of the blackness around human life and suddenly the colors that we have nailed to our mast are there no longer and all that we have grasped is dust.

~ Elizabeth Goudge

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

~ Alan Mccluskey

But I want to give in to it sometimes, only because I'm tired and the feeling that I've had for a while-that something is haunting me down-becomes all consuming and I'm frightened that one morning there will be not enough to keep me going.

~ Melina Marchetta

If she allowed herself to give in to the whole sadness of it, she'd never ever be able to operate like a normal person again.

~ Melina Marchetta

Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…

~ Diana Gabaldon

...it occurred to me that maybe Samson's hair wasn't the source of his strength; maybe it was the symbol of his strength. And maybe when Delilah cut off his hair, he didn't lose his power because he lost his hair; he just woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror, and suddenly for the life of him couldn't remember who he was.

~ Sarah Thebarge

Yes, one whose faith is continually stimulated by the upward look gives no ground to the attempted encroachment of despair. No matter how great the trouble or how dark the outlook, a quick lifting of the heart to God in a moment of real actual faith in him will completely alter any situation and turn the darkness of midnight into glorious sunrise.

~ Mrs. Charles E. Cowman

The pages aren't numbered, so I don't know whether I have the beginning or end or whether it's in sequence but these days I'm not really looking for continuity.All I'm after is something that makes sense to me.

~ Melina Marchetta

What, whom we put our hope in determines our stability! EL

~ Evinda Lepins

Hope is immeasurable anchor.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return.

~ Christine Montross

One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.

~ Malcolm Bradbury