9bcc8ad
|
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.
|
|
goodness
sadness
love
truth
inspirational
victory
despair
evil
|
Mahatma Gandhi |
30fc904
|
Do not let arrogance go to your head and despair to your heart; do not let compliments go to your head and criticisms to your heart; do not let success go to your head and failure to your heart.
|
|
criticism
inspiration
inspirational-attitude
inspirational-life
inspirational-quotes
inspire
life-and-living
life-quotes
living
motivation
optimistic
positive-affirmation
positive-life
inspiring
positive
positive-thinking
motivational
success
life-lessons
optimism
heart
life
inspirational
arrogance
compliment
failure
despair
|
Roy T. Bennett |
7a60060
|
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
|
|
suicide
grace
despair
|
Hermann Hesse |
b4f990e
|
This fall I think you're riding for--it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.
|
|
depression
inertia
despair
|
J.D. Salinger |
675783f
|
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
|
|
loss
love
despair
|
Andrew Solomon |
e7c7681
|
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
|
|
loneliness
sorrow
love
wisdom
ignorance
despair
insight
|
Margaret Atwood |
b5e0f36
|
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
|
|
fingernails
manicure
nails
despair
|
Ian McEwan |
560560e
|
He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it
|
|
sadness
love
leo-tolstoy
despair
|
Leo Tolstoy |
81ba73a
|
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something - the eternal 'what's the use?' - sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
|
|
perseverance
depression
despair
|
Gustave Flaubert |
a8947e6
|
"He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it. "Will," she whispered. "Say something, Will."
|
|
love
clockwork-angel
tessa-gray
will-herondale
despair
|
Cassandra Clare |
5b00752
|
...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.
|
|
sorrow
despair
|
Harriet Beecher Stowe |
78e26ef
|
And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?
|
|
metaphor
simile
rain
copy
mimic
shakespearean
poetic
fall
wind
cry
crying
despair
wit
howl
|
Mervyn Peake |
ba4c55e
|
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
|
|
hope
fulfillment
despair
|
George Eliot |
09f3490
|
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat. He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look . He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people's eyes and became an exasperating expression.
|
|
war
exasperation
smallness
public
personal
indifference
nationality
peace
desperation
despair
eyes
|
Arundhati Roy |
907be44
|
It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.
|
|
love
the-collector
john-fowles
despair
obsession
|
John Fowles |
4829f8c
|
But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.
|
|
light
hope
despair
|
Rick Yancey |
6a75b18
|
The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on--only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.
|
|
heaven
death
life
obituary
meaning-of-life
eternal-life
atheism
despair
hell
|
Christopher Hitchens |
a06bcac
|
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.
|
|
moving-on
letting-go
sadness
life
despair
|
Harriet Beecher Stowe |
63cc9e5
|
Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.
|
|
depression
leadership
strategy
despair
|
Frank Herbert |
b1049d1
|
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.
|
|
despair
|
Julian Barnes |
55bebbf
|
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
|
|
hope
despair
|
Graham Greene |
4c05d63
|
It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.
|
|
lies
reality
realism
despair
|
Terry Pratchett |
1f52b3a
|
We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.
|
|
despair
|
Jon Kabat-Zinn |
a5e9663
|
Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.
|
|
loneliness
brokenness
society
isolation
despair
|
Henri J.M. Nouwen |
141d014
|
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?
|
|
death
life
despair
|
Terry Pratchett |
f4a58d0
|
Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.
|
|
madness
joy
bewildered
incoherence
sparks
nervous
energy
despair
sickness
|
Luke Davies |
2745915
|
And now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear-shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying. It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at the darkest.
|
|
humanity
inspiration
hope
despair
|
Cressida Cowell |
a9793fc
|
"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"
|
|
poetry
life
philosophy
despair
|
T.S. Eliot |
e791161
|
Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.
|
|
enlightenment
children
despair
|
Hermann Hesse |
6f74b4c
|
When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.
|
|
despair
|
Henri J.M. Nouwen |
adc8915
|
I cannot do it. I cannot bear it. I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong or that good.
|
|
despair
|
Laurell K. Hamilton |
5d02003
|
I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.
|
|
despair
sad
|
Holly Black |
ef8031f
|
No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. -
|
|
death
identity
identity-crisis
doom
despair
|
H.P. Lovecraft |
fcfe60c
|
Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.
|
|
loneliness
isolation
despair
|
Bell Hooks |
d72da29
|
Defeat I can endure with cheerfulness, my lady. But betrayal is like taking the wind from my sails, or the earth from beneath my feet. It chills my spirits like a rainy day, and all I can do is draw the curtains and cry into my pillow.
|
|
treachery
despair
|
Margaret George |
cbcd098
|
"For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as "the shining world." There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair. "
|
|
restored
despair
|
William Styron |
4c8d23d
|
My days are as long as despair can make them.
|
|
despair
|
Kathryn Harrison |
52416f1
|
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.
|
|
hope
despair
|
Franz Kafka |
5dc86e4
|
"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."
|
|
mind
despair
|
Haruki Murakami |
af01886
|
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.
|
|
expression
despair
hell
|
Yann Martel |
cf83e06
|
Krystal flung herself violently off the chair, away from her mother. She was surprised to feel warm liquid flowing down her cheeks, and thought confusedly of blood, but it was tears, only tears, clear and shining on her fingertips when she wiped them away.
|
|
violence
emotion
tears
despair
|
J.K. Rowling |
84ef879
|
There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.
|
|
grief
futility
depression
hope
dark-history
falling-short
haunted-past
smoke-in-the-eyes
why-the-world-needs-jesus
unrest
pointlessness
bittersweet-memories
sins
heartache
vanity
disappointment
expectations
despair
regrets
nostalgia
|
Joseph Conrad |
1986824
|
Moonlight filtered in through the blinds illuminating their bedroom, but the bright glow couldn't penetrate the darkness that surrounded her heart.
|
|
hopelessness
depression
sadness
despair
|
J.E.B. Spredemann |
a723136
|
It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.
|
|
emotion
self-discipline
frustration
despair
self-control
|
John Howard Griffin |
049760d
|
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.
|
|
hypersensitivity
no-skin
despair
soul
memory
|
Fernando Pessoa |
6d0706c
|
It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last--into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into. And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he actually is a scoundrel.
|
|
hopelessness
struggle
depression
agony
inevitabilities
fatalism
shame
despair
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
d2e8459
|
"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."
|
|
loneliness
mind
depression
despair
obsession
art-creation
concentration
thought
mental-health
|
Don DeLillo |
8e509b3
|
I had kissed my share of men, particularly during the war years, when flirtation and instant romance were the light-minded companions of death and uncertainty. Jamie, thought, was something different. His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; rather it was a promise of power known and held in leash; a challenge and a provocation the more remarkable for its lack of demand. I am yours, it said. And if you will have me, then..
|
|
war
honesty
love
despair
|
Diana Gabaldon |
ce59b49
|
The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.
|
|
hope
despair
|
Warren G. Bennis |
02e9cfb
|
Anger was better than feeling nothing; because anger and hatred were the long-lasting fuel in the endless dark of my despair. The same way that music had kept me from breaking.
|
|
hatred
dark
darkness
music
breaking
feeling
feel
fury
despair
|
Sarah J. Maas |
81b7dd6
|
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.
|
|
reflection
despair
introspection
|
Saul Bellow |
20216cf
|
Music -- good music, great music -- had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.
|
|
music
despairing
pessimistic
tragic
purity
cynical
cynicism
despair
|
Julian Barnes |
84f3083
|
this is only the beginning. Many die, many kill their bodies and souls, but they cannot kill the justice of God, even they cannot kill the eternal spirit. From their very degradation that spirit will rise up to demand of the world compassion and justice
|
|
social-exclusion
lgbt
despair
|
Radclyffe Hall |
90ec40b
|
I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.
|
|
despair
|
Philippa Gregory |
dda6451
|
Real terror is a crippling experience. You sweat so much that your skin goes all wrinkly like when you've been in the bath all afternoon. And then the scent of your sweat changes. It smells like cat pee, no doubt from the adrenalin. However hard you wash, it won't come off. It smothers you, as your muscles become frozen with acid and your mind paralysed by despair.
|
|
fear
sweat
despair
terror
|
Tahir Shah |
b4a8680
|
He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength.
|
|
death
despair
dying
|
Leo Tolstoy |
b2b63f4
|
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.
|
|
despair
|
Fernando Pessoa |
06c2c2a
|
My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one's power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.
|
|
depression
motivation
philosophy
idleness
despair
|
Geoff Dyer |
03ad2e9
|
"It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. ("A Father's Story")"
|
|
imagination
moment
despair
|
Andre Dubus |
e69800e
|
"Good. Drink your tea," he ordered. "It will make you feel better." Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month's sugar ration into it. She drained the cup, feeling ashamed of herself. She wasn't the only one who'd had a bad night."
|
|
humanity
kindness-of-strangers
scarcity
war-rations
tea
despair
|
Connie Willis |
226d104
|
You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that's the blue we call 'I Had It But It's All Gone Now.
|
|
loss
sadness
music
music-lyrics
depths-of-despair
r-and-b
despair
|
Ken Grimwood |
7ea0788
|
Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.
|
|
prospective
despair
|
John Piper |
24004ce
|
She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel.
|
|
loneliness
death
hopeless
despair
|
Cornell Woolrich |
91f95f4
|
"... 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!"
|
|
faith
strength
hope
despair
|
Tite Kubo |
d8423bb
|
The courage to continue before the face of despair is the recognition in those eyes of darkness we find our own night vision. Women blessed with death-eyes are fearless.
|
|
death-and-dying
feminism
women
fear
fearless
despair
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
f2e7cbc
|
The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.
|
|
intriguing
despair
|
Victor Hugo |
dfa5077
|
Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.
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rabbit-angstrom
hospital
lust
regret
despair
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John Updike |
96ca272
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"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."
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cope
despair
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Robin Hobb |
5fb7156
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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!
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grief
sorrow
despair
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
b128450
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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.
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reading
hope
despair
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Jean Rhys |
cd048ca
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This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain.
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dust
nothing
emptiness
space
weakness
despair
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Gustave Flaubert |
0e5eab1
|
Bellamy found simply a task of amazing difficulty. It was as if ordinary human life were a mobile machine full of holes, crannies, spaces, apertures, fissures, cavities, lairs, into one of which Bellamy was required to (and indeed desired to) fit himself. The machine moved slowly, resembling a train, or sometimes a merry-go-round. But as soon as Bellamy got on (or got in), the machine would soon eject him, sending him spinning back to a where he was once more forced to be a . Perhaps, that was in some mysterious sense his place, his . But Bellamy did not want to be a spectator, nor could he (having no money of his own) afford to be one. Moreover he had never really mastered the art, apparently so simple for others, of . His failure to find a metier, to find a task which was task, caused him continuous anxiety, nor did it occur to him to emulate the majority of mankind who positively resigned themselves, seeing no alternative, to alien and unsatisfying work. At one time he had suffered from depression, and was nearer to despair than his friends realised.
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depression
work
left-out
place-in-the-world
the-green-knight
iris-murdoch
spectator
despair
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Iris Murdoch |
21b2092
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I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers - all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair - aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility. But there is little that I - or any surgeon in the Year of Our Lord 1848 - can do. God help us all.
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hopelessness
the-terror
despair
horror
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Dan Simmons |
c194cf2
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There was nothing to charm or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay. Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals -- and now this! How had this paralysis of hatred against myself and everyone else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an empty heart and despair crept over me so softly and so slowly?
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despair
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Hermann Hesse |
cfd666e
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It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb... Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it... Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way... Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto.
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poverty
sadness
despair
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John Howard Griffin |
fe8ba8b
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Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.
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metaphor
romance
bottomless-pit
dancing-with-clara
romance-hero
regency-romance
mary-balogh
angst
regency
rake
despair
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Mary Balogh |