All Quotes By Tag: Despair
“Just because you came to the end of your rope, doesn’t mean that you were climbing down.”
“The Second Koran tells us that the darkness in ourselves is a sinister thing. It waits until we relax, it waits until we reach the most vulnerable moments, and then it snares us. I want to be dutiful. I want to do what I should. But when I go back to the tube, I think of where I am going; to that small house and my empty room. What will I do tonight? Make more paper flowers, more wreaths? I am sick of them. Sick of the Nekropolis.I can take the tube to my mistress’ house, or I can go by the street where Mardin’s house is. I’m tired. I’m ready to go to my little room and relax. Oh, Holy One, I dread the empty evening. Maybe I should go by the street just to fill up time. I have all this empty time in front of me. Tonight and tomorrow and the week after and the next month and all down through the years as I never marry and become a dried-up woman. Evenings spent folding paper. Days cleaning someone else’s house. Free afternoons spent shopping a bit, stopping in tea shops because my feet hurt. That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning?”
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“So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…”
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“Life has many roadblocks. If you can’t move, create your own path. Quitting is not an option.”
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“Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.”
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“There at the cross, we see all pain and darkness conquered in such a way that it is defeated forever. Not by disregarding it. Not by denying it. But by giving value even to our tears. By loving everything about us, including our very worst hurts.”
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“The deepest wounds of the soul are healed only by compassion… People do not merely need to be clothed, they need to be embraced with love. A love that enters into their own fears and frailty, a love that suffers with them and stays with them through their darkest hour.”
“How do you wipe away pain? You don’t. You put in tenderness, compassion and joy. You cling to hope and then you offer everything to God. And you wait, with faith you see all things anew – light shines out from darkness, happiness grows through every pain, and all things become indeed so very beautiful in His time.”
“When we grow in faith, the doubt shall ceased.”
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“Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward?How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?”
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“Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.”
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“Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.”
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“Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.”
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“A tired man lay down his headin a dusty room so dim,and for so long his wife did shakeand yell to waken him.Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stirof sandy, red bullfights,of powder-blasts in the airand carnival delights.Yet still his wife was in despairin a dusty room so dim,for she knew death was a whorenot far from tempting him.”
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“Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.”
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