DESPAIR QUOTES II

quotations about despair

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

IRVIN D. YALOM

When Nietzsche Wept


In my heaven of despair
Lies the ocean of impurity
A ship made of angel's hair
Set sails on the morning tide

COVENANT

"Shipwreck", Dreams of Cryotank


The Disappointment of Manhood succeeds to the delusion of Youth: let us hope that the heritage of Old Age is not Despair.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Vivian Grey


Consider how the desperate fight;
Despair strikes wild, but often fatal too--
And in the mad encounter wins success.

WILLIAM HAVARD

Regulus


Real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.

ELIE WIESEL

"Hope, Despair, and Memory", Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986


Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.

JANET FINCH

White Oleander


Sadness, despair
Sometimes the things I cherish,
Sometimes that's all I've got,
And that's enough

NAPALM DEATH

"Contemptuous", Utopia Banished


Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

R. S. THOMAS

"Tidal", Mass for Hard Times


Despair leadeth damnation in chains.

ST. BERNARD

attributed, Antiquity: Or, The Wise Instructor


Though thou drewest a sword at thy friend, yet despair not: for there may be a returning to favour.

BIBLE

Ecclesiastes 22:21


There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede


Thus repuls'd, our final hope
Is flat despair.

JOHN MILTON

Paradise Lost


Despair came knocking
At my door
And I let her in
For a while
She sat on the couch
In the end, smoking
She said nothing

DANIEL JOHNSTON

"Despair Came Knocking", Continued Story


Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tehanu


Despair gives courage to a coward.

ENGLISH PROVERB


Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Fellowship of the Ring


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

EVELYN WAUGH

Vile Bodies


What burning agony of the soul, what direful convulsions of the brain attend despair, when every hope seems gone, and when every throb of the heart is a death-stroke; when the fibre of every nerve is charged with piercing, searching, and writhing tortures, and the intensity of life is upon us; here it is where the unfaltering energy of great minds fails not, but boldly wrestles with it.

ACTON

attributed, Day's Collacon


Despair doubles our strength.

ENGLISH PROVERB


Desperation is energized despair.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Hours