#despair

All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities. ↗

— Spalding Gray

#desire #despair #diary #longing #monologue

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#despair #fingernails #manicure #nails #life

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 endurate. Both go mouldy. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#despair #age

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. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#banality #death #despair #dread #ennui

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end. ↗

— László Krasznahorkai

#despair #warnings #death

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#despair #life #philosophy #poetry #death

The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#despair #hope #longing #loss #love

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#evil #goodness #inspirational #love #sadness

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable. ↗

— Andre Breton

#affairs #because #despairing #desperate #everything

Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy. ↗

— Comte de Lautreamont

#desire #despair #drew #exaggerated #good