All Quotes By Tag: Desperation

“Within her simple, terrified mind, swift calculations of distance and speed were at work, and her face advertised the disappointing results.”

“Le Goût du néantMorne esprit, autrefois amoureux de la lutte, L’Espoir, dont l’épéron attisait ton ardeur, Ne veut plus t’enfourcher! Couche-toi sans pudeur, Vieux cheval dont le pied à chaque obstacle bute.Résigne-toi, mon coeur; dors ton sommeil de brute.Esprit vaincu, fourbu! Pour toi, vieux maraudeur, L’amour n’a plus de goût, non plus que la dispute;Adieu donc, chants du cuivre et soupirs de la flûte!Plaisirs, ne tentez plus un coeur sombre et boudeur! Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur!Et le Temps m’engloutit minute par minute, Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur;Je contemple d’en haut le globe en sa rondeurEt je n’y cherche plus l’abri d’une cahute.Avalance, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?”

“The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she’d started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her–one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she’d never experienced world-weariness before. She’d never had time. All her life, she’d been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself–the entity that was Nico O’Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she’d worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.”

“There is no such thing as a boring person when you are lonely or extremely bored.”

“THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished –the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against–all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey could no longer talk together.And that is when he said it,in front of the guests,because he couldn’t bear to hear her.And this is why the guests have leftand she screams as he comes near her. ”

“I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.”

“اليأس ليس حالة عامة، بل هنالك يأسٌ خاص بحالات ما، ولا يعني أن الشخص قد استنفد كل الخيارات ويئس من الحياة برمتها، فذلك اليائس تماماً هو من يقدم على الانتحار فقط.”

“I love you and we don’t need the other world to keep that.” He glanced at the small window in the door to see if the guard was watching, then leaned over quickly and pressed their foreheads together.“It’s just true,” he said. “It always has been. In this world and the next. They could take everything away and leave us with nothing, and I would still love you.”

“Hope is sometimes a fickle thing, my dear.” The endearment felt painful when spoken as part of such a heartbreaking conversation. “We hang on to it because we need to, even when there really is no point.”

“You’ll get, with faith and hope what you think can be yours.”

“كيف ليَ أن أكتب قصيدة تخدش وجه العالموتدير دفّة القمر؟”

“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he’d seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.”

“Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.”

“Facing death calmly is praiseworthy only if one faces it alone. Death together is no longer death, even for unbelievers. The source of sorrows lies not in leaving life, but in leaving that which gives it meaning. When love is our whole life, what difference is there between living together and dying together ?”

“If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.”