149 Quotes About Overcoming Despair

Despair is a shadowy corner of the human experience that, at some point, many of us confront. It can sap our energy and cloud our perspective, making it hard to see the way forward. Yet, within the depths of despair lies the potential for profound transformation. Throughout history, countless individuals have faced this challenging emotion and emerged stronger, offering wisdom and inspiration to others in similar situations. In this collection of 149 quotes about overcoming despair, we explore insights from thinkers, leaders, and creatives who have navigated this emotional terrain and found resilience, hope, and new beginnings. These quotations are not just words; they are torches lighting the path through difficult times, reminding us that while despair is part of our journey, it is not the destination. Join us as we delve into these powerful reflections and uncover the strength that lies within each one of us to overcome the darkness and embrace the light of new possibilities.

1. “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.” - Mahatma Gandhi

2. “Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. ” - Paul Rogat Loeb

3. “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” - Søren Kierkegaard

4. “Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.” - Stephen R. Lawhead

5. “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.” - L.M. Montgomery

6. “And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.” - Anton Chekhov

7. “There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.” - Evelyn Waugh

8. “Is there any good news?' Tesla said.Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?” - Clive Barker

9. “Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

10. “In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.” - Branwell Bronte

11. “When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” - Oscar Wilde

12. “Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.” - Joseph Conrad

13. “My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.” - Anthony Swofford

14. “If you can cope the pride when winning,then you can confront despair when lose.” - Toba Beta

15. “A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.” - Philip K. Dick

16. “With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.” - Roman Payne

17. “I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."-white oleander” - Janet Fitch

18. “My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.” - Stephenie Meyer

19. “Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.” - R.D. Laing

20. “The only real laughter comes from despair.” - Groucho Marx

21. “He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.” - Cormac McCarthy

22. “...stooping very low, He engraves with careHis Name, indelible, upon our dust;And from the ashes of our self-despair,Kindles a flame of hope and humble trust.He seeks no second site on which to build,But on the old foundation, stone by stone,Cementing sad experience with grace,Fashions a stronger temple of His own.” - Patricia St. John

23. “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.” - Julian Barnes

24. “For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.” - Cox, Michael

25. “Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.” - Leonid Andreyev

26. “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

27. “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.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

28. “What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.” - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

29. “It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.” - Neil Gaiman

30. “The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life” - Orhan Pamuk

31. “It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion” - Jacqueline Carey

32. “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

33. “But, as I say, I was toofull of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have neverknown danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.” - H.G. Wells

34. “By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything” - H.G. Wells

35. “The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

36. “Courage is not the absence of fear or despair; it is the capacity to continue on despite them, no matter how great or overwhelming they become.” - Robert Fanney

37. “There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.” - George Eliot

38. “The tears that kept Buttercup company the remainder of the day were not at all like those that had blinded her into the tree trunk. Those were noisy and hot; they pulsed. These were silent and steady and all they did was remind her that she wasn’t good enough. She was seventeen, and every male she’d ever known had crumbled at her feet and it meant nothing. The one time it really mattered, she wasn’t good enough.” - William Goldman

39. “The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like 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.” - Christopher Hitchens

40. “What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

41. “I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.” - Sandy Welch

42. “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 meant. 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 personal 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.” - Arundhati Roy

43. “To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.” - James Hillman

44. “It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.” - Lemony Snicket

45. “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.” - Hermann Hesse

46. “...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe

47. “Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles longCoiled, one thousand miles deepEyes like candy, it has eyes like candyHard and blue, but soft as kittens feetOut of sight or in the element of lightIt could be a devil, it could be an angelWith spiders inside a vision from hellIts spine is a vertical screamSlow as concrete, blurred as a dreamFueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,Its soul--a twisted wreckage of despair and painAnd the spiders inside are just praying for rainKilling time killing timeAnd praying for rainOne thousand miles deep” - James O'Barr

48. “I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.” - John Keats

49. “In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.” - Aberjhani

50. “Being a cheerful hobbit, he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

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

52. “Despair wishes their hope diminishes.” - Sherina Gandia

53. “The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.” - Marion Zimmer Bradley

54. “For many, the search for Jesus is initiated from experiencing an event in life so powerful, it awakens the dragons of faith; from pain so deep, it calls on the hidden fears of the soul in an effort to survive. For others it means a serious personal life survey that ultimately forces the confrontation with the futility, anesthetics, and despair in their lives.” - W. Scott Lineberry

55. “Despair filled his skull even more tightly than his own brain. All around him cars filled with normal people perfectly unaware of the disease turning Perry's body inside out. Fucking normal people.” - Scott Sigler

56. “Christ! What are patterns for?” - Amy Lowell

57. “When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are," replied the girl steadily, "give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admireres, everything to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.” - Charles Dickens

58. “The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.” - james frey

59. “I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.” - Holly Black

60. “Grumble weakens the spirit.Despair is counterproductive.Both are true toxicants in life.” - Toba Beta

61. “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.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe

62. “Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.” - Irvin D. Yalom

63. “El destino se lleva siempre su parte y no se retira hasta obtener lo que le corresponde.” - Haruki Murakami

64. “Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.” - Theodore Kaczynski

65. “I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.” - Stanisław Lem

66. “I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.” - David Leavitt

67. “I can see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.” - David Herbet

68. “The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.” - Jonathan Franzen

69. “Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?''It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?''What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...''No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.'Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks:'There was Manicheanism...''Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...'Snow pondered for a while:'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.'I kept on:'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...''We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.''If you're going to take what I say literally...'...Snow asked abruptly:'What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.” - Stanisław Lem

70. “The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” - Woody Allen

71. “Despair is for people who know, beyond any doubt, what the future is going to bring. Nobody is in that position. So despair is not only a kind of sin, theologically, but also a simple mistake, because nobody actually knows. In that sense there is always hope.” - Patrick Curry

72. “The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

73. “George was full of hatred. Of his own weakness and stupidity, of his magic, of the stubbornness and the pride of Beatrice and Marit, and, last of all, hatred of Dr. Gharn, who had started it all.But the hatred swayed to pity. Then to hopelessness. Then back to anger.Every once in a great while, he felt a moment of peace, usually when he caught a glimpse of Beatrice and Marit together. He loved them both in different ways. But that could not be.He turned away, and the cycle began again.” - Mette Ivie Harrison

74. “I feel as if I had been born dead underAmerican bombardment.” - Stefan Bolea

75. “All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.” - Spalding Gray

76. “But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything.” - Sam Taylor

77. “And in despair I bowed my head;"There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong,And mocks the songOf peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!The Wrong shall fail,the Right prevail,With peace on earth, good-will to men!” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

78. “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.” - Cressida Cowell

79. “The look of disbelief that ran across the boy's face was somehow more disturbing than the despair it had replaced. This creature had given up hope long ago; he probably begged out of habit rather than expectation.” - Brandon Sanderson

80. “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.” - Tahir Shah

81. “For after all, why do we go on fighting? If we die for democracy then we must be one of the democracies. Let the rest fight with us, if that is the case. But the most powerful of them, the only one that could save us, chooses to bide its time. Very good. That is its right. But by so doing, that democracy signifies that we are fighting for ourselves alone. And we go on fighting despite the assurance that we have lost the war. Why, then, do we go on dying? Out of despair? But there is no despair. You know nothing about defeat if you think there is room in it for despair.There is a verity that is higher than the pronouncements of the intelligence. There is a thing which pierces and governs us and which cannot be grasped by the intelligence. A tree has no language. We are a tree. There are truths which are evident, though not to be put into words. I do not die in order to obstruct the path of the invasion, for there is no shelter upon which I can fall back with those I love. I do not die to preserve my honor, since I deny that my honor is at stake, and I challenge the jurisdiction of my judge. Nor do I die out of desperation.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

82. “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” - Leo Tolstoy

83. “The Imagination merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where, by the dim light of the knowledge we carry, we may glimpse something that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more closely it usually proves to be only trash whose glitter had caught our attention. Imagination is at once the source of all hope and inspiration but also of frustration. To forget this is to court despair.” - William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

84. “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.” - K. Jared Hosein

85. “The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.” - George Orwell

86. “The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.” - Steven L. Peck

87. “Phury knelt beside him and stroked his face. "I've only ever had you to live for. If you die I have nothing.I'm utterly lost. And you are needed here." Zsadist tried to reach out, but couldn't lift his arms as Phury stood up. "God, Z, I keep thinking this tragedy of ours is going to be over. But it just keeps going, doesn't it?" Zsadist blacked out to the sound of his twin's boots heading from the room.” - J.R. Ward

88. “Politics was his passion, but he wasn't suited for the rough-and-tumble of the game. He felt things too deeply. There was no wall between his head and his heart.” - Anderson Cooper

89. “Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.” - László Krasznahorkai

90. “Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.” - Tom Robbins

91. “Signý knew she would die a thousand deaths upon seeing another woman with him, bearing his children, raising them with him. All the while, Signý, caged in his dungeons, hearing all the painful details of his life with someone else, drowning in her own despair, her love for him turning to hatred. A more tragic life, she could not imagine.” - Farrah Naseem

92. “You were standing in the wake of devastation And you were waiting on the edge of the unknown And with the cataclysm raining down Insides crying "Save me now" You were there, impossibly alone” - Linkin Park

93. “I wish you did return my regard," he said. "More than I have ever wished anything in my life! Perhaps you may yet learn to do so: I should warn you that I don't easily despair!” - Georgette Heyer

94. “Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.” - Yann Martel

95. “We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.” - Elie Wiesel

96. “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.” - Don DeLillo

97. “When all else is lost, the future still remains.” - Christian Bovee

98. “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.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

99. “First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

100. “...I deliberately spilled the black ink of despair because my perfect soul was a stained glass illusion - can you understand that?...” - John Geddes

101. “...I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ...” - John Geddes

102. “The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.” - Alain De Botton

103. “In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.” - Robert Fripp

104. “I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.” - Voltaire

105. “Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.” - Sonya Hartnett

106. “February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.” - Albert Camus

107. “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

108. “Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.” - L.M. Montgomery

109. “The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.” - Leo Tolstoy

110. “Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.” - Simon Armitage

111. “When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.” - E.M. Forster

112. “I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson

113. “The only way to cry your eyes out and laugh your ass off at the same time is to have your mom or girlfriends present. Without them, the laughing part wouldn't be nearly as fun.” - Shannon L. Alder

114. “I would not have shied away from an assignment to sail a canoe around Cape Horn or to take charge of the government of Afghanistan.” - Jan Valtin

115. “Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.” - Elena Ferrante

116. “I dread the loss of her I've never touched love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak I miss a woman who was never born I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet Everything passes Everything perishes Everything palls my thought walks away with a killing smile leaving discordant anxiety which roars in my soul No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope” - Sarah Kane

117. “His mouth would have given despair to even the drollest of fools; it was a mouth made for frowns and scowls and sharply worded commands, all thin pale lips and clenched muscles, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh” - George R.R. Martin

118. “I can still hear the screams. They wake me in the night. Terrible, gut wrenching, painful screams; screams that can only come from the deepest and darkest recesses of the mind. These were not screams of pain. These were screams of years of sorrow and despair. These were screams that made your skin crawl. These were the worst screams I have ever heard. I cannot get them out of my head. Perhaps, they will be with me forever. I shouldn't be so lucky.” - Jamie Schoffman

119. “... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always "frontal" lobotomy;but was there any other kind?Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about.Some answer or trick of the will:the ability not to think about it.What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?He tended to conceptualize some ultimate,platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed,tembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability.He frequently had this feeling:What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people?What if he was simply ill-suited,the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs?The neurology of failure.What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair,and all his so called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?...” - David Foster Wallace

120. “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.--from "The Moon and the Yew Tree", written 22 October 1961” - Sylvia Plath

121. “I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.” - Samuel Beckett

122. “They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.” - Paco Ignacio Taibo II

123. “There is a point when the anguished soul finally despairs. A moment in life when the heart, the will, even the spirit crumbles. Some say that after much grief and drowning in tears, it is possible to pick up the pieces and carefully repair what was shattered. I say nay. For the chains of despair have no key, and the soul destroyed by that monster can never hope to be unaffected. There are things done that cannot be undone.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

124. “A desperate plea to the Trinityis not something you can justapologize for in the morning-Drunk Dialing the Divine” - Amber Koneval

125. “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.” - Terry Pratchett

126. “Don’t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful; there is no beatitude for the despairing.” - Amelia E. Barr

127. “How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.” - Edward Thomas

128. “I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.” - Roman Payne

129. “It's always almost Autumn, down here at Rock Bottom.” - Ashly Lorenzana

130. “Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.” - Jo Nesbo

131. “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.” - Cornell Woolrich

132. “It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just wait a minute,' and she’ll open her eyes! 'Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!' But they always do.” - Elizabeth Wein

133. “Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow.This is the way the world ends.from "The Hollow Man” - T.S. Eliot

134. “Moisture falls from the sky, cleansing the world and sustaining precious life. But it's the gloom—the cold, dark air—that receives notice. We fail to see the miracle of raindrops through our own tears.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

135. “He pried Clara's arms loose and stood up, smoothing his wrinkled coat. Clara looked straight into his face. Her eyelids were red, but her gaze was like a lance. Dr. Wintermute had a sudden, uncomfortable conviction that she had seen into his soul. It was a look he was to remember often in the weeks to come.” - Laura Amy Schlitz

136. “By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd. Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing oneself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Here there is no dragging of the feet, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing, he is ground smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm. Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally, the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying.” - Kierkegaard

137. “Trees lose their leaves in blizzards like these.” - Ashly Lorenzana

138. “I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below.” - Ashly Lorenzana

139. “مليت من نصحكولعلمكلو سبتك غرقان ف طموحكمين بس يرسيك على برالهامر اللي بتخطف عينكأبدا مش ليك.” - محمد ربيع محمد

140. “Ja nie jestem, mnie nie ma, ja dopiero będę.” - Wit Szostak

141. “Today is the day after my wedding. And nothing is the way I expected it to be.” - Rachel Abbott

142. “She searched her mind for a single day when it had felt good to be alive. There must have been one, surely?” - Rachel Abbott

143. “Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness.” - Anton Chekhov

144. “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.” - Victor Hugo

145. “Though it pained me, I gave in. Why was it that I repeatedly succumbed to the first whisper of a promised maybe? How did the enticer, hope, always find my heart unguarded? There was no such thing as hope. Not for me. Why was it so hard to accept that?” - Richelle E. Goodrich

146. “So now I just assume that it won't work, and that if it does work, I'll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn't, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I'm never aware of the hope until it's gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another "I'm sorry.” - Liane Moriarty

147. “Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.” - Graham Greene

148. “The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire... "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.” - Josef Pieper

149. “The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.” - Warren G. Bennis