Quotes about despair
page 2

“Those in love with someone who does not treat them special has endured countless hours of sorrow and despair.”

1988

“I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion. I need sunshine and paving tones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he exited!”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Four, Pappin

God, Freedom, Heart, Music

“We walk this earth
hand with hand and head by head
along with shadows of fairy tales
myths and legends spread by superstitious folks
and oddly we yearn to all of them
with sadness and despair
like drowning sailor who longs for sip of air
with playful joy against the odds
we seek to tame good auld death
forgetting that lady D is a wild cat
that carves its paths with fangs and claws step by step
step by step
until she is to close
- inside your head”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Source: We'll go asleep, poems and ballads, "Untill she is to close", pg 64

Forgetting, Cats, Joy, Sadness

“Strictures, reproaches, and intemperate speeches from the Senator of Louisiana are really the wailings of an apostle of despair; he has lost control of himself, he is trying to play billiards with elliptical billiard balls and a spiral cue.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Henry Fountain Ashurst

““Never despair. The darkest point of the night is the closest point to daylight. No success is achieved without effort, so fight for your goals and know that success is near.””

Alireza Kohany (1993) Musician, Actor, Entrepreneur

Source: https://knnit.com/lets-learn-the-story-of-alireza-kohanys-life-and-the-bridge-he-built-from-failure-to-success/

Night, Success, Fight, Effort

“The darkness isn't afraid of coming close to me, my fear of loneliness draws him towards me. Darkness surrounds me and despair takes hold of me. I start to torment my loneliness, and my silence begins to take my life. When I call my happiness darkness always turns happiness way. Darkness is not afraid of me coming close to me, my fear pulls it to me.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Drawing, Silence, Happiness, Loneliness

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Drawing, Silence, Happiness, Loneliness

“If the love of money is the root of all evil, the need of money is most certainly the root of all despair.”

Isaac Asimov book Half-Breed

Source: Short fiction, The Early Asimov Book One (1972), Half-Breed (p. 160)

Money, Love, Evil

“If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

“I am not made for despair”

Gillian Rubinstein (1942) Children's author and playwright

“Only someone who had experienced such bitter despair would be able to recognize it in another.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Then Came You

“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Hell

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Alcohol, Winter, Season

“Never despair. Never surrender.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Hope

“No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

“The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek (1946), Ch. 24

Knowledge, Victory

“To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Life, Reality, Sense

“At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it — but I did bear it. The question remains: how?”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

An Karl von U.

Question

“And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Source: Bite Me

Pain, Color

“You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.
You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.”

Lisa Gardner (1956) American author

Source: Live to Tell

Love, Hope, Thinking, Parent

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”

Erica Jong book Fear of Flying

Source: Fear of Flying

Life, Waiting

“If you weaken, I'll be strong. If you get lost, I'll be your way home. If you despair, I'll bring you joy. I will love you until the end of time.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

Love, Way, Home, Strong

“I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?”

Walker Percy (1916–1990) Southern philosophical novelist

Drink, Beer

“Stuart must have sensed my despair from the way I began lightly banging my forehead on the table.”

Maureen Johnson book Let It Snow

Source: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

Way, Sense

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Woody Allen book Mere Anarchy

"My Speech to the Graduates"
Side Effects (1980)
Variant: Mankind is facing a crossroad - one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction - I sincerely hope you graduates choose the right road
Source: Mere Anarchy

Wisdom, History, Time

“I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 32, Shadow in the Throes of Death
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Context: First, about the mind. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That this is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

Love, Hope, Loss, Joy

“When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of hate, suspicion and despair, all the love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge. Though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach faith where no faith was.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Love, Hate, World, Faith

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[…].”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Source: The Woman Destroyed

Books

“But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Age, Learning

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)
Source: I Have A Dream

Faith, Beauty, Dreams, Hope

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch (1871)

Hope, Pain, Hope

“She wondered that hope was so much harder then despair.”

Patricia Briggs book Cry Wolf

Source: Cry Wolf

Hope

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 175
Testimony (1979)

“We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book The Summer Tree

Source: The Summer Tree

“Despair and Genius are too oft connected”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Source: Byron Poems

“For many in our high-paced world, despair is not a moment; it is a way of life.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

Source: Can Man Live Without God

Life, World, Way

“I try to have reasonably happy endings because I would hate any child to be cast down in gloom and despair; I want to show them you can find a way out of it.”

Jacqueline Wilson (1945) novelist

Hate, Way, Happiness

“I remember discussions withwhich went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question:?”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Question, Night

“always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives”

Nancy Mitford book The Pursuit of Love

Source: The Pursuit of Love

Love, World, Water, Happiness

“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 book Outlander

Source: Outlander

“I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there
At least not over half.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Ten Mills : Not All There
1920s, Further Range (1926)

God, World

“To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Men, Soul, Passion, Happiness

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Source: The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

World, Evil

“And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be
like barbed wire to keep out despair,
hope must be a mine field.”

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) Israeli poet

Hope

“Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Life, Support

“‎It is better to pursue a hopeless hope than to give in to black despair.”

Isobelle Carmody book The Sending

Source: The Sending

Hope

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Dreams, Rage

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

Pleasure

“Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

World, Literature, Lovers

“A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Love, God, Suffering, Passion

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Hope, Animals

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Life, Feeling, Success, Future

“When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Love, Joy

“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

World, Hope, Future

“Some people fall apart when they get hurt. Puddle into apathy and despair and never recover. They wait all their lives for someone to come along and rescue them.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

People, Waiting, Hurt

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Four, Pappin
Context: I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion. I need sunshine and paving tones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he exited!

Music, Heart

“The only real laughter comes from despair.”

Groucho Marx book The Groucho Letters

Source: The Groucho Letters

Laughter

“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Love, Help, Personality

“We see a hearse; we think sorrow. We see a grave; we think despair. We hear of a death; we think of a loss. Not so in heaven. When heaven sees a breathless body, it sees the vacated cocoon & the liberated butterfly.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: Max on Life: Answers and Insights to Your Most Important Questions

Death, Thinking, Loss

“You are never stronger… than when you land on the other side of despair.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“Real courage is not to give up hope, even in the most terrible darkness, and to carry on. That if courage and love is deep as despair, deeper, then light may come again”

David Clement-Davies book Fell

Source: Fell

Love, Hope, Courage, Light

“Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Life, Mountain

“Angel screeched with fury and despair to the empty walls around her. "I'm human, do you hear me? It hurts!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Nevermore

Angels, Hurt

“It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

“Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair..”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Source: Fool

Life

“I'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

Children

“The Death Mist is not for helping!" Akhlys shrieked. "It shrouds mortals in misery as their souls pass into the Underworld. It is the very breath of Tartarus, of death, of despair!"
"Awesome," Percy said. "Could we get two orders of that to go?”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Death, Soul, Help

“And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Hope

“Your destiny grows clearer, Jason Grace. When the choice comes again- storm or fire- remember me. And do not despair.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“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.”

Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Love

“Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

“Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land and Other Poems

Hope

“Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Talking About a Revolution: Interviews with Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid, and Howard Zinn

Hope, Change

“We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.”

Clive Barker book Absolute Midnight

Source: Absolute Midnight

Love, Death, Way

“Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Love, Faith, Feeling

“Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

God, Truth

“I can't help but see myself in them. The Seelie are who I was before my sister died. Pink, pretty, frivolous Mac. The Unseelie are who I've become, carved by loss and despair. Black, grungy, driven Mac.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Sister, Loss, Help

“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

Men, Time

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Way, Hell, Suffering, Flying

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.”

Tom Robbins book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Source: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Sadness, Sex

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 3
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

Men, Youth, Sadness, Thinking

“She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Ironside

“Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

Death, World, Dreams

“Nil desperandum, -- Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Dead

“Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

“Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our accomplishments. Though we fall short, our labour is not lost if this day surpasses the preceding one.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 23.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

Way

“For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

Pleasure

“I hope that the kind reader recognises this as a despairing attempt at humour.”

Nancy Springer (1948) American author of fantasy, young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction

Hope

“Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Patience

“I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Life, People, Feeling, Heart

“Built to be lonely
to love the absent.
Find me
Free me
from this
corrosive doubt
futile despair
horror in repose.
I can fill my space
fill my time
but nothing can fill this void in my heart.”

Sarah Kane book 4.48 Psychosis

Source: 4.48 Psychosis

Love, Time, Heart

“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Remarks at "Loyola College Alumni Banquet, Baltimore, Maryland (18 February 1958) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx; Box 899, Senate Speech Files, John F. Kennedy Papers, Pre-Presidential Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library <br class="br">Pre-1960

Past, Future