Abyr Bathory > Abyr's Quotes

“The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.”
― J R R Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Some days simply lay on you like stones.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.”
― James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul

“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, Flaubert's Parrot

“At night I no longer dreamed, nor did I let my imagination work during the day. The once vibrant escapes of watching myself fly through the clouds in bright blue costumes, were now a thing of the past. When I fell asleep, my soul became consumed in a black void. I no longer awoke in the mornings refreshed; I was tired and told myself that I had one day less to live in this world. I shuffled through my chores, dreading every moment of every day. With no dreams, I found that words like hope and faith were only letters, randomly put together into something meaningless - words only for fairy tales. ”
― Dave Pelzer, A Child Called "It"

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

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“For Death is the meaning of night;
The eternal shadow
Into which all lives must fall,
All hopes expire.”
― Cox, Michael, The Meaning of Night

“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, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”
― Raymond Williams

“In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.”
― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.”
― Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: a Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

“It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“The art of our necessities is strange
That can make vile things precious.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

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

“Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.”
― John Clare, "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare

“Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

“I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.”
― John Clare, "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare

“Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.”
― Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son & Other Poems

“Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East

“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“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

“My days are as long as despair can make them.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

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

“NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“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