#desperation

To hold the rank of responsibility, requires you to make decisions that will not only hurt the enemy…but also your own. And there will come a time when the situation will be absolutely so bleak that every eye will turn to you out of fear and desperation. In that moment, you’ll have to become like the steel of your ship…and make the hardest choices of your life. Because if you don’t, there will be no one is else to do it for you. And you will always be alone in this. ↗

— Commander Paladin Martian Fleet - from Beyond Mars Crimson Fleet

#desperation #military #military-philosophy #rank #resposibility

At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year. ↗

— Andrew Geyer

#drought #emotional-pain #farming #heat #rural-life

If you were mine, I'd never leave you, Prudence. I couldn't. ↗

— Anne Gracie

#leave #longing #love #romance #sweet

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story. ↗

— John Fowles

#hopelessness #love #love

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth. ↗

— Hisham Matar

#intimacy #loneliness #love #love

Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left. ↗

— Michael Connelly

#desperation #escape #las-vegas #los-angeles #nevada

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#misattributed #tenacity #end

Between death and hell a bridge shining silver wings offers his soul hope. ↗

— Aberjhani

#angels-and-demons #bridges #death #depression #desperation

That if desperate times call for desperate measures, then I'm free to act as desperately as I wish. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#acting

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness