All Quotes By Tag: Despair

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”

“When all else is lost, the future still remains.”

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

“But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”

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

“Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.”

“The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.”

“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.”

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

“Being a cheerful hobbit, he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.”

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”

“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.”

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

“There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”