Despair Quotes

“The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.”
― Author-Poet Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”
― Ezra Pound

“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 indurate. Both go mouldy.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

“My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.”
― Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: a Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

“There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Courage is not the absence of fear or despair; it is the capacity to continue on despite them, no matter how great or overwhelming they become.”
― Robert Fanney

“Why does it have to be like this?' I asked bitterly. 'Why does life have to be so short, with all the good things passing quickly. Is it worth living at all?”
― Joseph Delaney, Night of the Soul Stealer

“For Death is the meaning of night;
The eternal shadow
Into which all lives must fall,
All hopes expire.”
― Cox, Michael, The Meaning of Night

“I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“It’s not my wish to walk intoxicated; to live for never is not my choice.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.”
― Branwell Bronte

“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, "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare

“It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn't to never feel hope, or bliss, or love-but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Think it over carefully. This is very important," I say, "because to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. Do you follow? When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“I know a man
He came from my home town
He wore his passion for his woman
Like a thorny crown
He said "Dolores
I live in fear
My love for you's so overpowering
I'm afraid that I will disappear”
― Paul Simon

“That girl had two chances. And both of us let her down.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are," replied the girl steadily, "give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admireres, everything to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.”
― Charles Dickens

“After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.”
― Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“When all else is lost, the future still remains.”
― Christian Bovee

“The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.”
― Edward Thomas, Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley;

“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.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Though it pained me, I gave in. Why was it that I repeatedly succumbed to the first whisper of a promised maybe? How did the enticer, hope, always find my heart unguarded? There was no such thing as hope. Not for me. Why was it so hard to accept that?”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Dandelions: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher

“Then, in spite of everything, he began to smile. So much of his existence in Everlost had been full of despair. Despair, and a fear of losing what he had. But Allie was not lost, she was just there across the river, waiting for him to find her. Nick was not lost either--not entirely.

It was then that Mikey McGill realized something. It must have been his sister who first called this place Everlost, because by naming it so, it stripped away all hope except for a faith in her, and the "safety" she could provide. Well, Mary was wrong on all counts, because nothing in Everlost was lost forever, if one had the courage to search for it.

Mikey held tightly on to this shining truth as he and the golem sunk into the earth. Then with all the force of his heart, his mind, and his soul, Mikey McGill began to dig.”
― Neal Shusterman, Everwild

“Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King