c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The Wind Will Carry UsIn my night, so brief, alasThe wind is about to meet the leaves.My night so brief is filled with devastating anguishHark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?This happiness feels foreign to me.I am accustomed to despair.Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?There, in the night, something is happeningThe moon is red and anxious.And, clinging to this roofThat could collapse at any moment,The clouds, like a crowd of mourning women,Await the birth of the rain.One second, and then nothing.Behind this window,The night tremblesAnd the earth stops spinning.Behind this window, a strangerWorries about me and you.You in your greenery,Lay your hands – those burning memories –On my loving hands.And entrust your lips, replete with life's warmth,To the touch of my loving lipsThe wind will carry us!The wind will carry us!
— Forough Farrokhzad
Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness―the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness―of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.
— Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories
When the mainstay of one's world is taken away, it's only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can." He shook his head sorrowfully. "But no one can ever go back to yesterday.
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic
I asked a man who took a death boat to Europe across the treachelous waters of the Mediterranean from Libya"Why are you taking this death boat". "I am already dead." He said. This is my coffin. If I succeed to get to the other side, I get a new life. If I fail, I loose nothing. I remain what I am now: Dead.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
Despair is the source of all evil
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.
— Upton Sinclair
My life has become like a bus, and I'm just watching it pass by
— Evy Michaels
History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ "The Briefcase
— Rebecca Makkai, Music for Wartime: Stories
The night sky alternated between black and bursts of colour. My stomach wanted food. My limbs wanted rest. My brain wanted sleep. My mind wanted oblivion.
— Srijita Sarkar, Red Christmas
A hopeless man is a very desperate and dangerous man, almost a dead man.
— Robert F. Kennedy
We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.
— Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows
...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.
— Alison Croggon, The Naming
The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.
— Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair…Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
There’s no hope for someone who doesn’t even know what hope is
— Eric Garcia
The sky and the sun are always there. It's the clouds that come and go.
— Rachel Joyce
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold, his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not.
— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finney. “They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why?” “You were free.” “I was free. Milton was right…the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now.
— Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder
I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities.The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bimbos floating around in an inexplicable mix of vacuity and despair. The crumbling face of my building looked pretty enough from across the street, but from here I could see how worn it was. I peeled off a satisfying chunk of paint, cement and matter. And I let it fall to the street below.
— Nasri Atallah
... I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.
— Danielle Collobert, Murder
Despair sees no hope, while hope sees no despair.
— Jim George
Despair is something horribly simple.
— Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit
Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune’s slings and arrows.
— Rick Yancey, The Final Descent
education without inspiration is only recipe for desperation
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Distinctive Footprints of Life: Where Are You Heading Towards?
Despair is the constant companion of the clown.
— Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
I’ll live out my whole life as a voice with no one listening.
— Tom Deaderick, Flightsuit
We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.
— Albert Einstein
There had come to him one of those moments of quiet despair that lie in wait for even the happiest. Stealthy-footed they leap upon us, as we walk along the street, as we sit at evening with fruit and wine upon the table and laughter on our lips, as we wake suddenly from sleep in the hour before dawn; neither at our work nor our play nor our prayers are we safe, those moments can leap at any time out of the blackness around human life and suddenly the colors that we have nailed to our mast are there no longer and all that we have grasped is dust.
— Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
Alan McCluskey“Despair is an ugly thing when it refuses hope.
— Alan McCluskey, In Search of Lost Girls
But I want to give in to it sometimes, only because I'm tired and the feeling that I've had for a while-that something is haunting me down-becomes all consuming and I'm frightened that one morning there will be not enough to keep me going.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
If she allowed herself to give in to the whole sadness of it, she'd never ever be able to operate like a normal person again.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…
— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
...it occurred to me that maybe Samson's hair wasn't the source of his strength; maybe it was the symbol of his strength. And maybe when Delilah cut off his hair, he didn't lose his power because he lost his hair; he just woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror, and suddenly for the life of him couldn't remember who he was.
— Sarah Thebarge
Yes, one whose faith is continually stimulated by the upward look gives no ground to the attempted encroachment of despair. No matter how great the trouble or how dark the outlook, a quick lifting of the heart to God in a moment of real actual faith in him will completely alter any situation and turn the darkness of midnight into glorious sunrise.
— Mrs. Charles E. Cowman
The pages aren't numbered, so I don't know whether I have the beginning or end or whether it's in sequence but these days I'm not really looking for continuity.All I'm after is something that makes sense to me.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
What, whom we put our hope in determines our stability!" EL
— Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day
Hope is immeasurable anchor.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, The Wings of Hope: Survivor
Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return.
— Christine Montross, Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.
— Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong
For some there is no musicNo lightsNo fireNo untamed madness that breathes lifeThere is workAnguishFrustrationRageDespairA dullness that rings like wooden thunder
— Henry Rollins
And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.
— Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
Do not despair. Have faith. It is going to work out and you will be delivered.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile / Mankind Under the Leash
Good things come to us just when we need them the most, like an angel throwing us a life-preserver before we go under the waters of despair.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Who would care if I became pregnant, who would be scandalized? Aunty Eva, Anwar's flatmates. Omar would never know unless I wrote to him. Uncle Saleh was across the world. A few years back, getting pregnant would have shocked Khartoum society, given my father a heart attack, dealt a blow ti my mother's marriage, and mild, modern Omar, instead of beating me, would called me a slut. And now nothing, no one. This empty space was called freedom.
— Leila Aboulela, Minaret
I felt as though my mind and heart had been dragged through a thicket of rose bushes and caught on every little thorn.
— Laura Lam, Pantomime
Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.
— William Gaddis, The Recognitions
...The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
No loss is big enough to lose hope for tommorrow.
— Mandeep Singh Randhawa
Merry’s mind devolved into chaos. Ideas evaded her. Words chased one another into meaningless jumbles. Her breath came in shallow gasps as the ghastly image of William’s lifeless body twisting in the wind, solidified and held.
— Susan Catalano, The Timeless Ones
In the moments of your deepest need, despair and desperation, what you need more than any other thing, is calm and faith.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When you run out of hope, everything is backwards. Your heart wants the opposite of what it needs.
— Andrew Peterson, The Warden and the Wolf King
[Deserters], they've given up everything. Oaths. Families. When you desert, it breaks you. It leaves you willing to do anything, because you've already given away everything you could have cared about losing.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.
— Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke
..giving into despair was like eating poisonous berries to keep from feeling hungry.
— Shannon Hale, Forest Born
And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I wanted to be good but I wasn't sure if I was prepared
— Leila Aboulela
Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
And I am weary of the anguishIncreasing winters bear;Weary to watch the spirit languishThrough years of dead despair.So, if a tear, when thou art dying,Should haply fall from me,It is but that my soul is sighing,To go and rest with thee.
— Emily Brontë, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
Kelly closed his eyes and began to bargain with God.
— Z.A. Maxfield
Yet in another and still more definite sense despair is the sickness unto death. It is indeed very far from being true that, literally understood, one dies of this sickness, or that this sickness ends with bodily death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this, not to be able to die So it has much in common with the situation of the moribund when he lies and struggles with death, and cannot die. So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die -- yet not as though there were hope of life; no the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one’s hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.
— Søren Kierkegaard
The air in my home is heavy with my mom's unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she's in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards. You can hear her banging pots and pans or cursing the vacuum cleaner
— Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items
He gasped in despair while he wrote to her knowing everything is going to end.He: Why did you ruin my image in front of your mother and family though I wasn't the bad guy?She replied Coldly: I acted childish and took revenge, I wanted to end this relation.He kept asking all that she accused him of.She kept admitting false allegations, something kept breaking inside him.Silence kept creeping into him, sorrow enveloped his soul and tears fell of his eyes for he knew all had ended.
— Anonymus Autor
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
— Emil M. Cioran
Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one's personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal.
— Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster
Good. Drink your tea," he ordered. "It will make you feel better."Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month's sugar ration into it.She drained the cup, feeling ashamed of herself. She wasn't the only one who'd had a bad night.
— Connie Willis, All Clear
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
You'd be surprised, Theo." she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, "what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Uncle said, "If love would save him, wouldn't no harm come to him.
— Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle
the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141
— Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
If Chase's wings are broken, then mine are shattered.
— S.R. Grey, I Stand Before You
She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.
— Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.
— Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool
What is unbelief but the despair, dictated by the dominant powers, that nothing can really change?
— Ched Myers
The greatest discovery is to find a hero within oneself that will choose life over death
—  and fight for hope through despair to possess the will to live.
To act as though we have hope is to keep hope alive
— Greg Van Eekhout, Diverse Energies
Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?
— Kevin Smith, Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good
Do not consider despair as a thick and high wall standing on your way
—  it is just a darkness and you can still walk in the darkness till you reach the light!
How poor you are, September. You make my heart groan. I know about Homesickness. It begins with H. What will you do?
— Catherynne M. Valente
The road of doubt leads to the dead-end of despair. Time to change directions!" HS/el
— Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day: Coffee Hour with Chicklit Power
Hope, in general, is dangerous. Hope can be the loose thread that pulls apart your sanity.
— Alessandra Torre, The Girl in 6E
Nora knows better than most that nothing lasts forever. Life doesn't, love doesn't, hope doesn't, so why would death, hate, or despair? Nothing is permanent. Not even the end of the world.
— Isaac Marion, The New Hunger
For anything worth accomplishing, we can always find reasons to doubt, just as we can also find reasons to proceed...I have chosen to side with faith and hope over doubt and despair.
— Brandon Mull, Chasing the Prophecy
I know a manHe came from my home townHe wore his passion for his womanLike a thorny crownHe said "DoloresI live in fearMy love for you's so overpoweringI'm afraid that I will disappear
— Paul Simon
We love against the night, burning like stars against the darkness of bread and circuses.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
I tried desperately to put my thoughts into the forms of prayers, but I didn't know how. If God was real, I figured He was powerful enough to know what I wanted without me actually saying the right words.
— Richelle Mead, Shadow Kiss
Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day--the light of day, faint in her windowless room.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.
— Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
...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, Of Men and of Angels
Investigating Koreiko's case might take a long time," said Ostap. "God only knows how long. And since there is no God, nobody knows. We are in a terrible bind.
— Ilya Ilf, Golden Calf
Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:
— Alexander Cockburn, Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era
How can I be lost, if I've got nowhere to go?
— Metallica, Metallica: Death Magnetic
So now I just assume that it won't work, and that if it does work, I'll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn't, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I'm never aware of the hope until it's gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another "I'm sorry.
— Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot
Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Je pensais de meme que notre jeunesse etait finie et le bonheur manqué. I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.
— Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes
Not now.It's too late.It was always too late.
— Sidney Sheldon, Memories of Midnight
Our measure of hope is in direct proportion to our ability to conquer hopelessness.
— LeeAnn Taylor
If you are in a pit of stress or despair, don’t succumb to defeat. Don’t accept that difficult place as your fate. Even though God has allowed you to be there right now, he never intended for you to live there. Our God is bigger then whatever problem you are facing. The only way to see past the problem is to believe that he has not forgotten or abandoned you and that, at the exact time that he has ordained, he will reach down and pick you up.
— Tracie Miles, Stressed-Less Living: Finding God's Peace in Your Chaotic World
You’ve had many ordeals in the past. During these ordeals, life seemed unbearable. You may have collapsed from the exhaustion of hopelessness and curled into a fetal position. Regardless of how difficult this new ordeal may be, as with the others, this too will be overcome. It will make you stronger.
— John-Talmage Mathis, For the (Soon) Unemployed: You Against Them
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
— Christian Wiman
Sometimes it feels as though happiness is just a word people say to hide the despair of not knowing anything.
— Michael  Gilbert, Modern Happiness
Today is the day after my wedding. And nothing is the way I expected it to be.
— Rachel Abbott, Only the Innocent
The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Have you ever felt happy and miserable at the same time?” I sighed.“Yes.” Hutch sat up. He threw the covers back and got out of bed. He opened up the blinds sending rays of bright sunlight into his room. “But I got over it. I figured out no matter how much I worried about it nothing ever changed.
— Holly Hood, Black Moon
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
— Elie Wiesel
I dread the loss of her I've never touched love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak I miss a woman who was never born I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet  Everything passes  Everything perishes  Everything palls  my thought walks away with a killing smile  leaving discordant anxiety  which roars in my soul No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope
— Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis
How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.
— Edward Thomas, Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley
The only way to cry your eyes out and laugh your ass off at the same time is to have your mom or girlfriends present. Without them, the laughing part wouldn't be nearly as fun.
— Shannon L. Alder
A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
In the park which surrounded our house were the ruins of the former mansion of Brentwood, a much smaller and less important house than the solid Georgian edifice which we inhabited. The ruins were picturesque, however, and gave importance to the place. Even we, who were but temporary tenants, felt a vague pride in them, as if they somehow reflected a certain consequence upon ourselves. The old building had the remains of a tower, an indistinguishable mass of mason-work, overgrown with ivy, and the shells of walls attached to this were half filled up with soil. I had never examined it closely, I am ashamed to say. There was a large room, or what had been a large room, with the lower part of the windows still existing, on the principal floor, and underneath other windows, which were perfect, though half filled up with fallen soil, and waving with a wild growth of brambles and chance growths of all kinds. This was the oldest part of all. At a little distance were some very commonplace and disjointed fragments of the building, one of them suggesting a certain pathos by its very commonness and the complete wreck which it showed. This was the end of a low gable, a bit of grey wall, all encrusted with lichens, in which was a common doorway. Probably it had been a servants' entrance, a backdoor, or opening into what are called "the offices" in Scotland. No offices remained to be entered-pantry and kitchen had all been swept out of being; but there stood the doorway open and vacant, free to all the winds, to the rabbits, and every wild creature. It struck my eye, the first time I went to Brentwood, like a melancholy comment upon a life that was over. A door that led to nothing - closed once perhaps with anxious care, bolted and guarded, now void of any meaning. It impressed me, I remember, from the first; so perhaps it may be said that my mind was prepared to attach to it an importance, which nothing justified. ("The Open Door")
— Mrs. Oliphant, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
He pried Clara's arms loose and stood up, smoothing his wrinkled coat. Clara looked straight into his face. Her eyelids were red, but her gaze was like a lance. Dr. Wintermute had a sudden, uncomfortable conviction that she had seen into his soul. It was a look he was to remember often in the weeks to come.
— Laura Amy Schlitz, Splendors and Glooms
(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes - the presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable - the unloving and the unloved - there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death - the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. ("The Lifted Veil")
— George Eliot, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.
— Luke Davies, Candy
When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
— E.M. Forster, The Life to Come and Other Stories
Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow.
— T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays
I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
— Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Novellas
I remember in treatment, Mr. Shaw told me that the alcohol and drugs never were my problem. He said the alcohol and drugs were my solution and that was my problem. And he was right.
— Ryan Winfield, South of Bixby Bridge
Defeat I can endure with cheerfulness, my lady. But betrayal is like taking the wind from my sails, or the earth from beneath my feet. It chills my spirits like a rainy day, and all I can do is draw the curtains and cry into my pillow.
— Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles
We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth... you will always be in despair.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.
— Sonya Hartnett, Surrender
His mouth would have given despair to even the drollest of fools; it was a mouth made for frowns and scowls and sharply worded commands, all thin pale lips and clenched muscles, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
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, Bleak House
They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.
— Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.
— Elena Ferrante
... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always "frontal" lobotomy;but was there any other kind?Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about.Some answer or trick of the will:the ability not to think about it.What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?He tended to conceptualize some ultimate,platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed,tembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability.He frequently had this feeling:What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people?What if he was simply ill-suited,the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs?The neurology of failure.What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair,and all his so called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?...
— David Foster Wallace
I would not have shied away from an assignment to sail a canoe around Cape Horn or to take charge of the government of Afghanistan.
— Jan Valtin, Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin
A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.
— Washington Irving
If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter.
— Anchee Min, Red Azalea
My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.
— George Washington
Can you think what the Mirror of Erised shows us all?" Harry shook his head."Let me explain. The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is, he would look into it and see himself exactly as he is. Does that help." Harry thought. Then he said slowly, "It shows us what we want... whatever we want..." "Yes and no," said Dumbledore quietly. "It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible."The Mirror will be moved to a new home tomorrow, Harry, and I ask you not to go looking for it again. If you ever do run across it, you will now be prepared. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that. Now, why don't you put that admirable cloak back on and get off to bed.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours.
— Kristin Hannah, Firefly Lane
The best place to cry is on a mother's arms.
— Jodi Picoult, House Rules
I have a sister, so I know-that relationship, it's all about fairness: you want your sibling to have exactly what you have-the same amount of toys, the same number of meatballs on your spaghetti, the same share of love. But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It's bigger than words.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff
When you feel neglected, think of the female salmon, who lays 3,000,000 eggs but no one remembers her on Mother's Day
— Sam Ewing
Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
I ask you, what good is a big picture window and the lavish appointments and a priceless decor in a home if there is no mother there?
— Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness
When did my house turn into a hangout for every grossly overpaid, terminally pampered professional football player in northern Illinois?""We like it here," Jason said. "It reminds us of home.""Plus, no women around." Leandro Collins, the Bears' first-string tight end emerged from the office munching on a bag of chips. "There's times when you need a rest from the ladies."Annabelle shot out her arm and smacked him in the side of the head. "Don't forget who you're talking to."Leandro had a short fuse, and he'd been known to take out a ref here and there when he didn't like a call, but the tight end merely rubbed the side of his head and grimaced. "Just like my mama.""Mine, too," Tremaine said with happy nod.Annabelle spun on Heath. "Their mother! I'm thirty-one years old, and I remind them of their mothers.""You act like my mother," Sean pointed out, unwisely as it transpired, because he got a swat in the head next.
— Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Match Me If You Can
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.
— Phyllis McGinley
When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.
— Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
Every time you drink a glass of milk or eat a piece of cheese, you harm a mother. Please go vegan.
— Gary L. Francione
What-what do you want?" Annabeth asked, trying to maintain a tone of confidence.The voice cackled maliciously.'To curse you, of course! To destroy you thousand times in the name of Mother Night!'"Only a thousand times?" Percy murmured. "Oh, good...I thought we were in trouble.
— Rick Riordan
My mother's life was way too heavy for me.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
Isn't this the truth of any good mother? That in all of our lives. We worry only about those we brought into this world, regardless of whether they loved us back or treated us fairly or understood our shortcomings.
— Adriana Trigiani, Big Cherry Holler
And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.
— Jessica Valenti, Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness
We want Max to... breed. To produce heirs. Who will govern the world after she dies."Dead silence for quite some time. We all stared at Dr. Hans, our jaws dropped to various levels. Our lives had reached a new low of inhumanity.My face flushed. Part of me had assumed, hoped, that if Fang and I lived long enough, we would get married. Maybe have a little flock of our own. But i really hadn't planned it all out. And he was gone now, anyway. How could I possibly ever find someone...My eyes scanned Dylan's face, I saw his discomfort."Oh, no," I said in horror."Yes," Angel confirmed. "Freaking unbelievable.
— James Patterson, Angel
Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her...
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
My mother belonged to that group of low IQ individuals who find everything alarming and believe that raising your voice is the most effective form of communication.
— Annabelle R. Charbit
Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.
— Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories
There is no teacher equal to mother and there's nothing more contagious than the dignity of a father.
— Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird
Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
There is something about losing your mother that is permanent and inexpressable - a wound that will never quite heal.
— Susan Wiggs, The Goodbye Quilt
I went to bed feeling melancholy, wishing I could havepoured out all my fears and insecurities to my mom. Wasn’tthat what normal mothers and daughters did?
— Richelle Mead, Bloodlines
[Everyone needs] a woman who'll listen, take your side, tell the truth - or not, as you need it. A woman you can count on, no matter what, and who'll love you no matter how much you screw up.
— Nora Roberts, Chasing Fire
And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.
— Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
And also, one is a mother in order to understand the inexplicable. One is a mother to lighten the darkness. One is a mother to shield when lightning streaks the night, when thunder shakes the earth, when mud bogs one down. One is a mother in order to love without beginning or end. 
— Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter
Mom?" Mother turned to Grandmother."What?""She's going to lunch with her kidnapper!""Take a picture for me," Grandma said.
— Ilona Andrews, Burn for Me
Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl.How could I not love this man? But it was a love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No ful
— Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
A mother's hardest to forgive.Life is the fruit she longs to hand youRipe on a plate. And while you live,Relentlessly she understands you.
— Phyllis McGinley
...be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh; but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?
— Jamaica Kincaid
this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming;
— Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River
I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
Babies of around one year old are often active by day and wake frequently at night, for no obvious reason. Then a mother can feel desparate for sleep yet equally desparate to comfort her baby when he needs her at night. I have spoken to many mothers who have sacrificed their own sleep, waking up numerous times every night because their babies cried for them. It seems terrible that these hardworking women think of themselves as failures as a result. Surely a mother who has chosen to sacrifice her sleep deserves respect and admiration for her generous mothering.
— Naomi Stadlen, What Mothers Do: especially when it looks like nothing
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
— Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
I love you every day,Mom
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day