Desperation Quotes

“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.”
― Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life

“Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.

They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.

His fairy story.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Jane! will you hear reason?' (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) 'because, if you won't, I'll try violence.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Things are never as they seem. A person. A Mark. A statement. They are always deeper than we perceive, like walking in the ocean and suddenly dipping under the surface because the bottom has disappeared beneath your feet. The water appears shallow until you are suddenly flailing around beneath the surface, desperately searching for stable ground once again.”
― Kelseyleigh Reber

“Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.”
― Bernardin De Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie

“The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.
She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.”
― Candace Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle

“Facing death calmly is praiseworthy only if one faces it alone. Death together is no longer death, even for unbelievers. The source of sorrows lies not in leaving life, but in leaving that which gives it meaning. When love is our whole life, what difference is there between living together and dying together ?”
― Raymond Radiguet, The Devil in the Flesh

“Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.”
― James Thurber, Further Fables for Our Time

“It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends”
― Milan Kundera

“We sensible often resist intrusive love and its chaos practically, employing measures to prevent the former for fear of the latter. But for all our wit and work, that desperation for control also prevents the pure, transcendental freedom more often delivered by both.”
― Tiffany Madison

“...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.”
― Marceline Loridan-Ivens, But You Did Not Come Back

“If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?”
― Steven Erikson, The Crippled God

“Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.”
― Galt Niederhoffer, The Romantics

“I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that's it. I'm awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.”
― Paula Hawkins , The Girl on the Train

“I have friends in the police, friends in the military, we can do anything you want.”
― Edward Williams, Framed & Hunted: A True Story of Occult Persecution

“The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?”
― Stephen King (Richard Bachman), The Long Walk

“Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.”
― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

“People never know what they are capable of until all other options run out.”
― Lance Conrad, The Price of Loyalty

“I won't go back to the darkness! I am going to live! Is it really so wrong of me to want to live?!”
― Kafka Asagiri, 文豪ストレイドッグス 55Minutes [Bungō Stray Dogs 55 Minutes]

“THIS IS WHY

He will never be given to wonder much
if he was the mouth for some cruel force
that said it. But if he were
(this will comfort her) less than one moment
out of millions had he meant it.

So many years and so many turns
they had swerved around the subject.
And he will swear for many more
the kitchen and everything in it vanished --

the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator door
he had been surely propped against--
all changed to rusted ironwork and ash
except in the center in her linen caftan:
she was not touched.

He remembers the silence before he spoke
and her nodding a little,
as if in the meat of this gray waste
here was the signal

for him to speak what they had long agreed,
what somewhere they had prepared together.
And this one moment in the desert of ash
stretches into forever.

They had been having a dinner party.
She had been lonely.
A friend asked her almost joking
if she had ever felt really crazy,

and when she started to unwind her answer
in long, lovely sentences like scarves within her
he saw this was the way
they could no longer talk together.

And that is when he said it,
in front of the guests,
because he couldn't bear to hear her.
And this is why the guests have left
and she screams as he comes near her. ”
― Michael Ryan, God Hunger

“If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“To love, to live, to feel so much that your world keeps spinning, faster and faster, in that wonderful, chaotic mess of humanity that you’d so hastily give up. Immortality is overrated. It is nothing but the ability to live through it all and not experience a single thing, to eat everything without tasting it at all." Isak’s eyes shone with a desperate need. He wanted, more than anything it seemed, to be like me, when all I wanted was to be like him.”
― Sophia Whittemore, The Funnyman

“A desperate soul needs a good and inspiring music”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“Talvez os selvagens nunca abandonem o poder - afirmou Philip com ar de desalento. - Talvez a cobiça nunca deixe de pesar mais nos conselhos dos poderosos que a sabedoria; talvez o medo nunca deixe de vencer a compaixão na mente dum homem com uma espada empunhada.”
― Ken Follett, Os Pilares da Terra, Volume II

“I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“The world as we know it, cruel, dark and hopeless, have gifted us one more reason why, as a species, shoud we accept the fact that we're living in absolute ignorance. One more chunk of food for our fears and desperations. One more nightmarish and haunting thought for our dreams.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Pritajeno zlo

“Endurance over-goaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley