Desperation Quotes - Page 2

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?

There is greater clarity in the still waters of sadness, something not found in the babbling brooks of more sought after emotions.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

In the final analysis, with Rene she had been an apprentice to love, she had loved him only to learn how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to Sir Stephen.

Being alone is much better than being around negative people out of loneliness or desperation.

Within her simple, terrified mind, swift calculations of distance and speed were at work, and her face advertised the disappointing results.

THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished --the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against--all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey 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 leftand she screams as he comes near her.

If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse.

...don't you realize a flawless profile means nothing when a mere smile drives me to desperation? Don't you covet that power?..

In troubled times, one wishes for a sound sleep more than usual, but on the contrary, realizing its amplified importance, sleep smugly impedes all attempts to woo it.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

I was shaking so hard, I could barely get the door unlocked. I just got the door shut behind me when I sank to my knees and fell apart. I cried so hard I was nearly convulsing. I had never felt such raw emotions in my life. I felt like someone had ripped my heart out of my chest and tore it to pieces. I curled into a ball on the floor and tried desperately to disappear. But no matter how small I got, I was still here. I still existed. And for a short while, I thought I had mattered to someone. I guess I was wrong. I mattered to no one.

But she stopped herself. That wouldn't make it right. You didn't forgive because it was the only choice you thought you had. That didn't make it forgiveness, that made it desperation. She'd always been too desperate about Jake. Always.

Stop treating your feelings like they are worth so little. I'm your heart, you idiot. Stop treating me like I'm worth so little. Choose me over your brain for once... Please...

I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.

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?

The truth is, living in any society is difficult. Those who become desperate with a fractured sense of security are much more prone to being taken advantaged of.

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

A month ago it would have been my dream just to be in his bedroom watching a movie, but now it’s torture because I want so much more. It’s like my entire conscious state has been reduced to this toxic blend of hope and uncertainty. I hate that I have to act cool and almost pretend I don’t like him when in fact I do, because, God forbid, I come across as desperate for attention or a little clingy, which everyone should know are perfectly natural human behaviors, after all. Ugh!

We had firsthand witnessed the ethereal evil of crushing hope just when it had peaked—like an open door, visible to you as you approach it from miles away, just closing on you when you have only two more yards to go.

You would not believe what skill, power and ability your total intelligence possesses until you are in desperate need.

education without inspiration is only a recipe for desperation

Don't mistake determination for desperation. Someone who is persistent will stop at nothing to get their way.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.

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.

Just underneath your breaking point lies your true strength.

He realized he needed strength, sustenance that couldn’t come from bread alone. He desperately needed God.

Neil said to me once that in times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision.It's your choice, he said. Us or them. So choose.

Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left.

A person’s outlook on life colors their interpretation of specific events. Human beings’ behavioral and thinking patterns enable people to thrive or cause them to live in despondency and despair.

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.

I fear that one day I will no longer understand desperation, and with that, I will slowly stop listening to what others have to say.

You're desperate, and so am I,' I said. 'Desperate people make stupid decisions all the time.'"P244

Claire.It was the last candle left within the Indian Agent. The last glimmer.He curled himself around it to keep it alive, and when the storm inhaled he studied his right hand, could feel her beside him in the carriage that night and, as if he could insist on this, looked up the depression he was calling a road, for the cabman's blindered horse, huffing through the snow, its lanterns swinging. Claire waiting for him on the worn velvet seat.

He sent up another silent prayer to wherever desperate prayers go and took the first step toward what he hoped would be salvation.

I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.

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.

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

It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends

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.

I went down to the river,I set down on the bank.I tried to think but couldn't,So I jumped in and sank.

Happiness isn't something she spends much time thinking about. Survival, discomfort, hunger...these are the concerns that fill her days.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

Cries for help are frequently inaudible.

Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.

Desperation will drive you to do things you know will never make you whole again and even to lose the very thing you’re desperate for.

I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.

The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.

When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.

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.

Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.

There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

To whomever is writing this book, what do you want from me? I need to know my calling. Why was I chosen? Why not Lee? Why not Susan March? Why me? What is my purpose? Please let it be more than to destroy a life and embarrass another. I need to know. I am suffering. You are a constant headache. Anywhere I go, I can hear you, I can feel you. I want to be like the others, ignorant of this.

The Oxys filled holes in me I hadn't realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.

If you were mine, I'd never leave you, Prudence. I couldn't.

Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.

The only thing that keeps me going, is the desire to get away as far as possible.

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.

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

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.