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Despair Quotes

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Despair Quotes

“To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.”

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Author:John Cheever
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“We who are privileged to be in these chambers today can view the challenges we face as opportunities, not as reasons for despair. We can do this only if we blend our independent spirits in terms of reverence for the life and respect for nature. Each of you might suggest different words, but our goal certainly is the same: a better Oregon.”

IfsDifferentReasonMightTodayFacesSpiritOpportunityGoalTermCan DoChallengesViewsDespairIndependentReverencePrivilegedChamberOregonChallenges We Face
Author:Tom McCall
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“Will you keep going when you don't know why? When you can't get any answers that would make the pain go away, will you still say, 'My Lord,' even though his ways are not clear to you? Will you keep going-with all the grace and grit and faith you can muster-and live in hope that one day God will set everything right. Will you trust that God is good? ... Ultimately, the choice everyone faces is the choice between hope and despair. Jesus says, 'Choose hope.'”

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Book:Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them
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“At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and confusion away. We simply don’t know. And we have no way to numb ourselves or to forget the condition we’re in.”

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Author:Marya Hornbacher
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“We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.”

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Author:Saul Alinsky
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“All the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears - you don't believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise - you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair - you want to crawl ignominiously home away from these painful writhing things that once were men, these shattered, tortured faces that dumbly demand what it's all about in Christ's name.”

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Author:Evadne Price
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“Do not despair! Work steadily. Sincerity and love will conquer hate. How many seemingly impossible events are coming to pass in these days! Set your faces steadily towards the Light of the World. Show love to all... Take courage! God never forsakes His children who strive and work and pray! Let your hearts be filled with the strenuous desire that tranquillity and harmony may encircle all this warring world. So will success crown your efforts, and with the universal brotherhood will come the Kingdom of God in peace and goodwill.”

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Author:Abdu'l-Bahá
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“To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.”

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Author:Audre Lorde
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“For example, I'm terribly proud. I'm as mistrustful and as sensitive as a hunchback or a dwarf; but, in truth, I've experienced some moments when if someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I'm being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you're very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament.”

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Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. As long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. It's better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we're up against.”

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Author:Chris Hedges
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“A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.”

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Book:The High King: The Chronicles of Prydain
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“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror!”

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Author:Joseph Conrad
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“Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.”

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Book:No Man Is an Island
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“I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.”

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Author:Josephine Winslow Johnson
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“A smile flickered across Coral’s face. “Have you ever noticed that once you have had a taste of certain sweets—raspberry trifle is my own despair—it is quite impossible not to think, not to want, not to crave until you have taken another bite?” “Lord Swartingham is not a raspberry trifle.” “No, more of a dark chocolate mousse, I should think,” Coral murmured. “And,” Anna continued as if she hadn’t heard the interruption, “I don’t need another bite, uh,night of him.”

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Author:Elizabeth Hoyt
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“In my heart I know you didn't come here just for me, you came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect union.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“With the situation as gray as it could be, no one was more conspicuous in his calm presence of mind than Washington. They must be "cool but determined" he had told the men before the battle, when spirits were high. Now, in the face of catastrophe, he was demonstrating what he meant by his own example. Whatever anger or torment or despair he felt, he kept to himself.”

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Author:David McCullough
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“We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“One of the best safeguards of our hopes, I have suggested, is to be able to mark off the areas of hopelessness and to acknowledge them, to face them directly, not with despair but with the creative intent of keeping them from polluting all the areas of possibility.”

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Book:Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless
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“I know not how to defeat others, I only know how to win over myself. The real and most dangerous opponents we face in life are fear, anger, confusion, doubt and despair. If we overcome those enemies who attack from within , we can attain a sure victory over any attack from without.”

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Book:The Way of the Warrior (Young Samurai, Book 1)
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“The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.”

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Author:Theodor Adorno
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“More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.”

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Author:Woody Allen
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