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It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
J. R. R. TolkienThere are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK.
Jim CarreyI treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.
Lucy GrealyI 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 FitchTo him whom contemplates a trait of natural beauty, no harm nor despair can come. The doctrines of despair, spiritual or political servitude, were never taught by those who shared the serenity of Nature. For each phase of Nature, though not invisible, is yet not too distinct or obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not too demanding of our attention.
Henry David ThoreauI myself have loved a lady and pursued her with a great deal of under-age protestation, whom some three or four gallants that have enjoyed would with all their hearts have been glad to have been rid of. 'Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.
John WebsterHere life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.
May SartonโYou 're not eating anything,โ said Marilla sharply, eying her as if it were a serious shortcoming. Anne sighed. โI can 't. I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?โ
Lucy Maud MontgomeryNothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
Honore de BalzacWhen you think of what you are, and despair; think also of what He is, and take heart.
Charles SpurgeonSome people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.
Luke DaviesTo me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
Alice WalkerSomething doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
B. F. SkinnerWhatever happens to you, don't fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can't see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path...Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want.
RumiI don't really know what people's perception about Palestinians.All art is to better life. We want to create hope and share with others. Create more pleasure, and object to despair. Really it's about that. A space where we can be less aggressed upon.
Elia Suleiman[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.
Jean-Paul SartreThere is a hint of despair in the cry of 'I told you so,' an element of disappointment in the apparent satisfaction when idols turn out to have clay feet. The human race, when it thinks it has proved that no one is superior, is partly gratified and partly depressed.
Alice Thomas EllisWithout the knowledge of our wretchedness, the knowledge of God creates pride. With it, the knowledge of God creates despair. The knowledge of Christ offers a third way, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.
Blaise PascalThe Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over and over again. [If so, Providende would] ultimately grow weary through despair.
Bertrand RussellThe 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 SandersonDespair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
Adrienne RichIf we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out โ since our self-image is untenable โ their false notions of usโฆ We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
Joan DidionSins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than of lust.
Piers Paul ReadThere are times when you are in despair, because in order not to betray who you are, you don't compromise, you don't make movies that would be very lucrative or prestigious or easily understood. And yet I stay attached to the most uncanny premises. It's never been easy.
Guillermo del ToroI think what was special about 'Music by Prudence' was the classic story of the title subject's life path - from being an outcast in her society because she was disabled, to someone who picked herself from that despair and elevated herself within that community, and now that society accepting her as much as they formerly rejected her. People identified with that journey, overcoming an obstacle, but still triumphing.
Roger Ross WilliamsWhatever comes out of despair cannot bear the title of valor, which should be lifted up to such a height that holding all things under itself, it should be able to maintain its greatness, even in the midst of miseries.
Philip SidneyIn a world characterized by loneliness and despair, we can reach out in love to those around us. Or, as St. Francis once said, we can "preach the gospel all the time; if necessary, use words."
Phil CallawayWithout despair, we will share, and the joys of caring will not be erased. What has been, must never end, the joys of caring will not be replace.
George MichaelIt is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.
Mark RothkoThe bible says no man can take your joy. That means no person can make you live with a negative attitude. No circumstance, no adversity can force you to live in despair. As Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of wheelchair-bound President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often said, โNo one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Joel OsteenIn 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 FrippPoetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give oneโs loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
Christian WimanLet 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. KennedyBeing a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.
Steven G. KrantzDespair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.
Frederick BuechnerI believe I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which situations we find ourselves in. In despair, I would steal food if my children were hungry.
Karin FossumThe 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 Beveridgewe are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.
Winifred HoltbyIf you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.
Michele Bachmann(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
Lorrie MooreNow he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.
F. Scott Fitzgerald