Quotes & Sayings About Desperation

When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on — Theodore Roosevelt

The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces. — Iain M. Banks

How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility? — Laini Taylor

So now, out of desperation, I'm back to prayer. I'm back to prayer, sheepishly, because I couldn't make my life work without it. I pray out of sheer lack of options. — Shauna Niequist

I don't know anything," she said. "Except that desperation and fear make a person do really stupid things. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation. — Rick Moody

There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty. — Ray Lamontagne

Could anyone hear her out that window? Inexplicably, in her mind she saw the young man who saved the little girl from the runaway horse. Could he hear the desperation in her voice? Would he be willing to come to her aid and help her escape from the prison that was her life? But that was foolish. No one could help her. She had to save herself. — Melanie Dickerson

She wondered If I had woken up, would I have smelled his sadness, his desperation, and his detachment?
His death, her breath.
He told her once, she remembers, these two words have no other rhyme but each other.
If she could go back, she thinks
She would open her eyes, instead of her heart. — Rachel Thompson

Brianna peered through the large window into the sea of plexiglass cradles. Each infant, so small and precious, belonged to someone. Someone who cared for them. Someone who loved them. Brianna sniffled and turned away, unable to bear the thought that she had no one. — J.E.B. Spredemann

Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness - these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. — Ryan Holiday

When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap. — Peter Lynch

Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near. — Philip Yancey

I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder
alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware
is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all. — Barack Obama

You cry out in your sleep - all my failings expose. There's a taste in my mouth, as desperation takes holdJust that something so good just can't function no more. When love, love will tear us apart again. — Ian Curtis

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but it is also the grandmother of desperation. — Dean Koontz

What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence. — Studs Terkel

In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins. — Richard Matheson

Desperation will drive you to do things you know will never make you whole again and even to lose the very thing you're desperate for. — Laura Miller

I wanted him to show me and teach me and correct me. I wanted to learn to please him with a desperation I couldn't explain. — Laurelin Paige

We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration. The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not "natural." This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction. — Howard Zinn

Such a little child
To send to be a priestling ...
Icy poverty — Shiki

Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer. — T. Greenwood

Sophia and Grandmother sat down by the shore to discuss the matter further. It was a pretty day, and the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this
dog days
that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid. When the moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders. — Tove Jansson

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness. — Ron Suskind

They say in moments of great fear or desperation, a man will always make a choice - either to flee or face his enemy, but choice requires thought, and in the moment when you know for certain that death is stalking you with strides you cannot outrun, there is no time for thought. You do not choose. Like Betto, or Malchus, or Valens, you act, doing either one thing or the other. — Andrew Levkoff

Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it's coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there. — Beryl Markham

This is the thing, I think often, that never occurs to you when you consider what it would be like to lose someone you love. That you would miss not just the flowers and kisses, but the totality of the experience. You miss the failures and little evils with as much desperation as you miss being held in the middle of the night. I wish he were here now, and I was kissing him. I wish he were here now, and I was betraying him. Either would be fine, so fine, as long as he was here. — Cody McFadyen

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

The name itself is trouble. "Slough" means, literally, muddy field. A snake sloughs, or sheds, its dead skin. John Bunyan wrote of the "slough of despond" in Pilgrim's Progress. In the 1930s, John Betjeman wrote this poem about Slough: Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow, Swarm over, Death! Then he got nasty. To this day, the residents of Slough rankle when anyone mentions the poem. The town's reputation as a showpiece of quiet desperation was cemented when the producers of the TV series The Office decided to set the show in Slough. — Eric Weiner

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what's there, and not angry for what's not. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all - men, women and children - defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely ... When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live ... It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. — Curzio Malaparte

I am home, you soggy-faced, entitled little prick, he barely stopped himself saying. You think it took northern sorcery to make me the way I am now? You think it took a war? Those things were tonic compared to what came before. Desperation and deception were waiting for me at the nursery door, took me by either hand as I walked out into my youth, have been my constant companions since. — Richard K. Morgan

In anguish and desperation, I reached out as I had many times before to the presence I call the Beloved. This unconditionally loving and wakeful awareness had always been a refuge for me. — Tara Brach

I choose to rise up out of that storm and see that in moments of desperation, fear, and helplessness, each of us can be a rainbow of hope, doing what we can to extend ourselves in kindness and grace to one another. And I know for sure that there is no them - there's only us.
— Oprah Winfrey

People need me. I fill them. If they can't see me for a while they get desperate, they get sick. But if I see them too often I get sick. It's hard to feed without getting fed. — Charles Bukowski

Studies of people who report high well-being in their fifties and sixties indicate that they have lived lives that involved personal risks. They are not people whose lives have been calm and predictable. A life under tight control sometimes produces quiet desperation. High well-being is a life that has depth and quality. Risks, losses, problems, and tragedy add pain to a life. That pain becomes a teacher. We learn; the pain gives us no choice. — Jennifer James

Cripes, just listen to that desperation mixed with a wild joie de vivre. That doesn't come out of nothing. They'll be able to hear that a massive eruption once rocked the world and scattered pain and passion in it's wake. — Cat Winters

He didn't say it; he had to keep his desperation from bursting through the thin layer of dignity it had been wrapped in throughout the interview. Clark smiled and patted him on the arm. — Imbolo Mbue

I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful. — Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe it is desperation. Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love. — Lauren DeStefano

the deepest form of humiliation isn't experienced in the eyes of others, but in the lonely desperation of oneself. — Natalia Sylvester

Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation. — Vita Sackville-West

How horrible to think what we may wish for, lay in anguish for, may be within our reach but we are unable to see them. — D. Morgenstern

Be moral. Be brave. Be a heart-whole man, strictly moral, brave unto desperation. Don't bother your head with religious theories. Cowards only sin, brave men never, no, not even in mind. — Swami Vivekananda

He bent and whispered against her ear. "Stay close, Erienne. The towel has come loose. If you step away, it is at your own risk."
Clenching her eyes tightly shut, she buried her face against his shoulder to hide the crimson tides that swept over her and clung to him with a panic born of desperation.
Unable to see his face, she missed the smile that widened his lips.
-Christopher & Erienne — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Away I turned, from the ghosts that brought me to this place. From an insatiable desperation to be wanted and my urge to fill the emptiness inside. — Jennifer Irwin

All I really need," he continued, "is for you to act as a deterrent."
"A deterrent?" she choked out.
"A human shield, if you will."
"What?"
"I cannot be left alone with that woman," he said, and he felt no remorse at the low desperation in his voice. "Please, if you have any care for your fellow man."
Her lips clamped together in a suspicious line. "I'm not certain what I get out of the equation."
"You mean besides the joy of my delightful company?"
"Yes," she said, with an impressive lack of inflection, "besides that. — Julia Quinn

In Ruin City, in the rain, the sound of melancholy is a buzzing maelstrom of quiet desperation. The shatter has been so great, there is no sound left to despair. — Radhika Mukherjee

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph. — Pete Townshend

He climbed out of the car, feeling stiff and awkward with that hot heavy weight between his legs, that miserable unsatisfied ball of need. Better play it cool, though; if Jonathan knew how bad off he was, the teasing would last for hours. Sadists smelled desperation as surely as sharks scented blood in the water. And Jonathan was very much at the top of his particular food chain. — Rachel Haimowitz

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph. — Pete Townshend

It was nothing I hadn't thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn't sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light — Tartt

It is not in vain that the strategic criterion of placing only short runs on the market prevails in order simultaneously to create a feeling of scarcity and avoid an appearance of uniformity, both of which encourage consumer demand. This is such a powerful criterion that it is not uncommon to discontinue production of a much-sought-after product, sometimes to the relative desperation of the shop staff, who were sure they could sell it. — Enrique Badia

I'll park somewhere dark." She fisted his T-shirt, not even ashamed of her desperation. "Out of the way - "
"Tempting ... so ... fucking ... tempting."
He gently peeled her hand away, slammed the door, and got in the driver's side. Then he turned to her, the harsh planes of his face in the shadows creating a savage expression the stuck her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
"I need you in a bed tonight, Jillian. I need more than a fuck. I need to make love to you until neither one of us can move, because after tonight, I don't want there to be even the slightest doubt that you're mine. — Larissa Ione

The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral - into the indigenous American berserk. — Philip Roth

Journalism doesn't have to be your first love ... or your only love. You can come to it in desperation, because you can't think of anything better to do with your life, that it's this or the abyss. But once you get going ... it helps if you love it. — Robert Krulwich

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Marko was nothing more than a dealer, serving me false emotions with ecstasy-doused injections. Poison to my heart. Addiction for my soul. And I was eating it up with all the desperation of a junkie. — Alaska Angelini

The desperation meeting the silence with its unmasked wish. — Libba Bray

He pulled her against his chest, letting her feel his heart thunder its rhythm. Kissing her hair he whispered, the desperation raw, "You are no dream...but flesh and blood. Tell me you are real...oh, please...be real." "Aye, I am real. — Deborah MacGillivray

I am not a doctor,' I replied, 'I only help those who come to me in desperation. When a man is brought to me naked I do not know his race or allegiance. I will treat the sick, and if you do not allow me to do so, then I will treat no one. — Theresa Breslin

Sometimes we don't know that it's best to run. Hanging on in desperation seems to be our way. — Amy A. Bartol

'Beyond Glory' is responsible for this wave that I've been fortunate enough to ride for the last few years. And that I did primarily because I didn't know what else to do. You might say I did it out of desperation. — Stephen Lang

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

For most Black people there is still poverty and desperation. The Ghettos still exist, and the proportion of Blacks in prison is still much greater than Whites. Today, there is less overt racism, but the economic injustices create an "institutional racism" which exists even while more Blacks are in high places, such as Condoleeza Rice in Bush's Administration and Obama running for President. — Howard Zinn

It smelled like Lysol and desperation. — Rachel Caine

Ben wrapped his fingers tightly around mine, brown eyes fierce, his thoughts a maelstrom of anger and worry. He was only thinking of me. Of getting me away. Keep me safe.
Ben was ready to die for me.
Chance halted before a battered case halfway down the wall. He began pulling on books, muttering to himself as he shoved each one aside.
They won't get you, Ben promised abruptly. I felt his determination flowing through the bond, mixed with love and desperation. He really would give his life to protect mine. — Kathy Reichs

Desperation is energized despair, and despair is the abandonment of hope. — Dean Koontz

Fear will make a person grasp in desperation for answers--be they truth or fable. — Beem Weeks

Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention. — Gavin De Becker

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom. — Tullian Tchividjian

BUDGE (muffled)
No,no,nono.
NURSE BAKER
I understand what you're trying to say.
BUDGE
A hideous scream.
NURSE BAKER
Exactly.
BUDGE
A cry of desperation.
NURSE BAKER
Perfect.
BUDGE
A strangled sob. A plea torn from my throat. What sound can I make to convince you I'm not the one you want? A disconsolate sigh? Maybe that's what you want to hear. The smallest human moan imaginable. A whisper in a corner of an unlit room, with curtains blowing in the wind.
NURSE BAKER
What could be more touching? — Don DeLillo

I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation. — Ruth Benedict

Just one word, infused with naked desperation; half prayer, half enchantment. It felt like a freezing charm on her soul making her his prisoner, yet setting her free all at once. — Genevieve Dewey

There is a difference between desire and desperation. — Tyra Banks

The bed probably knew almost as much about desperation and hate as he did. — Anonymous

Man stands on the brink of hell. The forces building up in our world are so overwhelming that man everywhere is beginning to cry out in desperation: What must I do to be saved? — Billy Graham

Whenever it shows itself - hope, that is - hands from the crowded streets reach for it with such violent urgency because of the fear that they may never see it again. They do so without knowing that their desperation frightens hope away. Hope also doesn't know that it is its scarcity. that causes the crowd to lunge at it, shredding its robe. And as it struggles to escape, the fabric scraps land in the hands of some but last only for hours, a day, days, a week, weeks, depending on how much fabric each hand is able to catch. — Ishmael Beah

He loved the raw strength of Haris, his edge of desperation, the need he couldn't hide. — Barbara Elsborg

Desperation makes men fearless — Jocelyn Murray

Why are so many people struggling with depression and discouragement? They've lost heart. Why can't we seem able to break free of our addictions? Because somewhere along the way, in a moment of carelessness or desperation, we gave our heart away, and now we can't get it back. — John Eldredge

With Clinton, of course, the term "world stage" was peculiarly literal: he had a fading vaudevillian's desperation to be loved. — Mark Steyn

Desperation is the secret to my steady employment. I am not interested in downtime. I really like to keep working all the time and I always feel like I'm in the mail room of life; working up. — Henry Rollins

Charlie said, his voice rising an octave in desperation. "I know it's ridiculous, but I keep trying to rationalise everything and it's driving me crazy. Did you spot that flying horse earlier? I found myself trying to explain it with Darwin's Theory of Evolution. — Victor Kloss

Remember what we wrote? 'And just as I cannot imagine how I survived the past without you ... I cannot imagine a future without you.' Remember? Well, I'm the future without her, buddy boy, and I can tell you right now that it's not something you're going to relish. — Peter David

Why is it harder to leave a loveless marriage than a loving one? Because a loveless marriage is born of desperation, while a loving one is born of choice. . . — Anonymous

His jeans, soft against her legs, made her realize that twice tonight they'd done the deed with him more dressed than not. She liked such desperation in a man. — Marilyn Pappano

His Noise saying, No, no, not now, not NOW-
And then he says, Viola?
"I'm here, Todd," I say, my voice breaking, shouting with desperation. "I'm here!"
And he says Voila? again-
Asking it-
Asking like he's not sure I'm there-
And then his Noise falls completely silent-
And he stops struggling-
And looking right into my eyes-
He dies.
My Todd dies. — Patrick Ness

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative in negative. Or as Paul the Apostle wrote, 'I have learned the secret to contentment in any and every circumstance.' He was right. Indeed the Lord is our strength, especially under the commandment to love one another. Otherwise we are nothing and easily thrown about by both our own and other people's mind control in a painful, mental, physical desperation to run from every thought, every thing, and every one not seeming so positive or immediately beneficial to us. — Criss Jami

The place smelled of smoke and sweat, of spilled drinks and sprayed vomit, of desperation and wasted chances — Joe Abercrombie

Three and a half years in L.A. was enough for me. I would love to go back for short bursts if a film opportunity came up, but it's a unique place, and you can reach saturation point. For me it was a place where creative desire and ambition meets desperation. It's in the air; it's palpable - I just didn't want to be around that. — Darren Boyd

When I was in High School I fell for pretty much any girl I ever met. But I was so desperate that I couldn't get any of them because they sensed my desperation! After many, many years, I learned to relax and just be myself. — Jack Black

It was helpful to have the confidence of youth that came from a lack of desperation. I thought, 'If I don't succeed, I'll go back to school and study.' — Olivia Wilde

It was a weird kind of desperation. We knew frenzied fucking, and we knew covert quickies, but this was something else entirely. — Christina Lauren

Oh God, what's wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out? — Helen Fielding

The value in my room is neither my Television nor my bank note. The value in my room is myself! Why? Because even if I lose everything I have, but still get me, I am coming back with full passion and desperation to climb the unclimbed hills again and again! — Israelmore Ayivor

They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment. — Louis L'Amour

The X-Games - I watch that; I'm not impressed. That's white dudes' desperation. They're running out of sports. They gotta find something that black dudes won't touch. — Godfrey

For the vile human pigs in life; the sloppy, disheveled, uncaring dregs, the ungrateful, and especially for the vicious, negative emotional peasants - there will only continue to be the hard and painful lessons you so desperately need. The invisible hand will hold you in your wretched place until your last breath - unless you evolve. If you are cruel and ignorant the invisible fist will pound you into oblivion until you submit, humble yourself and soften your hard heart. — Bryant McGill