#pair

And in despair I bowed my head; "There is no peace on earth," I said; "For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!" Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: "God is not dead, nor doth he sleep! The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men! ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#despair #god #hope #poetry #men

...you can take comfort that despair is the worst thing he can spring on you. Things can appear to grow worse, but if you conquer despair, no deeper pit remains to trap you. ↗

— Bodie Thoene

#men

When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something. ↗

— Dmitri Shostakovich

#music #music

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. ↗

— Janet Fitch

#despair #sadness #music

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. ↗

— George Eliot

#satisfaction #sorrow #change

Trees lose their leaves in blizzards like these. ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#depression #despair #hopelessness #leaves #metaphor

Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for.  There is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#despair #gridley #miss-flite #richard #tie

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... ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#cycles #despair #emotion #fear #free-will

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting. ↗

— Stuart Jaffe

#history #short-story #world-war-ii #short-story

He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it. “Will,” she whispered. “Say something, Will.” But there was nothing to say. There was only emptiness, as there had been before her. As there would always be. 'I have lost everything', Will thought. 'Everything. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#clockwork-angel #despair #love #tessa-gray #will-herondale