Quotes about despair

When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in the past. Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of paper. My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrote it fifty times. And I believed it, too.

“We are still ruled, in some ways, by our Church. We are a people more cursed by religion and its manifestations and assumptions than any other. The Steel Tsar, with his messianic socialism, offers us religion again, perhaps. You English have never had quite the same need for God. We have known despair and conquest too often to ignore Him altogether.” He shrugged. “Old habits, Mr Bastable. Religion is the panacea for defeat. We have a great tendency to rationalize our despair in mystical and utopian terms.”

“Better the myth of happiness,” Harlequin murmured, “than the myth of despair.”

I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.

It means you don’t like where you’ve been, the place where you are is grim, and the only place you see yourself going is not an improvement on what’s gone before.

Ay, Faustus, now hast thou no hope of heaven

Therefore despair! Think only upon hell,

For that must be thy mansion, there to dwell.

Accursed Faustus, wretch, what hast thou done?

I do repent, and yet I do despair.

Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast.

What shall I do to shun the snares of death?

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

I shake like a ship in a storm. It is a fact that even warming moments overwhelm me with despair, and this is why I am I.

From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk! Oh! My friend, if you had known me as I once was, you would not recognize me in this state of degradation. Despondency rarely visited my heart; a high destiny seemed to bear me on, until I fell, never, never again to rise.

To me the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful. The cup of life was poisoned forever, and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness...