Feeling Desperate Quotes & Sayings

Love. The stuff of sonnets and madrigals and fairy tales and novels.
Love. The elusive emotion that made men weep and sing and ache with desire and passion.
Love. The life-altering feeling that made everything bright and warm and wonderful. The emotion all the world was desperate to discover. — Sarah MacLean

I know. And I couldn't wait any longer, I have to tell you - "
The panic rises, and I grip the French band tighter. "Cricket, please -"
But his words pour forth in a torrent. "I can't stop thinking about you, and I'm not the guy I used to be, I've changed -"
"Cricket -" I look back up, feeling faint.
His blue eyes are bright. Sincere. Desperate. "Go out with me tonight. Tomorrow night, every ni -" The words cut off in his throat as he sees something behind me.
Cigarettes and spearmint. I want to die.
"This is Max. My boyfriend. Max, this is Cricket Bell. — Stephanie Perkins

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America. — Kiese Laymon

She set a tankard of grog before him, the moment before he became aware of his own thirst. Gray reached for it, shaking his head. A long swallow of watered-down rum added fuel to his resentment. He'd allowed himself to become so transparent to her, while she remained an enigma to him. Her talents fit no logical pattern-sketching, painting, deceit, seduction, thievery...now the ability to pound biscuit and salted meat into a fair-tasting chowder? It was enough to make him abandon all hope of ever comprehending her.
Perhaps he never would. But it was another thought that had him hurrying through his food, desperate to put some distance between them. He might never understand her, Gray realized, but he could get dangerously accustomed to this other feeling.
Being understood. — Tessa Dare

The small launch bay was littered with debris. A powerful breeze tore at his black silk shirt as Kilroy made his way across it to the waiting shuttle, evoking a feeling like the fingers of fate were caressing his body. "The Hammer" stepped over the body of one of his fallen crew without a trace of care or concern. The air was rushing past him, like a wind, out into space through the wounds in the side of his ship. Fatigued and desperate, the Hammer was running out of options. His ship was a mess, holed in a dozen places, the life support systems failing. Weakened hull sections were collapsing in pressure bursts. The vibrations that shook the deck beneath him now were not from the engines that once drove her forward, but now from the explosions down below, tearing her apart. — Christina Engela

I'm not desperate anymore or feeling weird about myself because I'm not working in this business. I'm older and wiser, and there's a lot more to life. — Melanie Griffith

Fighting with Harper stirred his blood, and walking out on her had only intensified his need, as though the brief separation was more than he could bear. All he could think about was getting back to her. Undressing her. And fucking her until he worked whatever this desperate feeling was out of his system. — Mandy Baxter

My so-called love for humanity, for instance, isn't something I get to carry around in my heart. It has to find application among the weird, desperate people who populate my daily experience. It has to put on flesh. If it doesn't, I might take pleasure in the warm, fuzzy feeling of my personal, private faith, but it wouldn't be appropriate to call it Christianity. — David Dark

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square ... the critics ... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert" ... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling ... — Kazimir Malevich

I'm not sure what the future holds but I do know that I'm going to be positive and not wake up feeling desperate. As my dad said 'Nic, it is what it is, it's not what it should have been, not what it could have been, it is what it is.' — Nicole Kidman

She had to do something. She felt so desperate she couldn't even stand to be in her own skin. She would rather have clubbed herself over the head with her history binder than feel the things she was feeling.
This was why she had broken up with him. So she wouldn't have to go through this. The wishing and wanting and not having. Why had it turned out so wrong? — Ann Brashares

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage
a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own. — Lauren DeStefano

Were you feeling all right?"
"No, not at all."
"Bellyache?"
"Yeah, a two-month bellyache called Vivian-itis. Symptoms include desperate longing and inability to do anything but feel like a douchebag. Patient can't do shit on the field but stand there like an ass, wondering what the fuck he's doing with his life. It's chronic. No known cure. — C.D. Reiss

With each impact you tell me that my body belongs to you; that I am
yours to use, yours to punish and yours to screw. Your words are almost as
powerful as your hand. They leave me feeling breathless and desperate for
your cock. You are working me into the usual frenzy of slutty desire that
we have both come to love. If I was permitted I would tell you how much I
love you right now and how much I need this. But it's not my words which
are important at the moment. Instead I demonstrate my devotion to you in
my complete submission to your desire. — Felicity Brandon

There was nothing passionate, nothing lustful, nothing desperate about that kiss, just the sweet and delicate feeling of comfort while having someone there. Someone to hold while being held. Someone who wanted you. Someone who needed you. Someone who looked at you through eyes without judgment, and who knew your past but did not define you by it. Who understood that you'd been through something horrible but did not reat you like you were made of glass. — L. Stoddard Hancock

There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did. — Sally Mann

In retrospect, I'm embarrassed by how little effort on his part it took for me to come back or stay. I was so desperate for him to love me, to want me, to fight for me that I was literally grateful for any mere scrap of effort. I'd made so many excuses for his inability to treat me well that even the smallest gesture was amplified in my head. After years of this, I finally got my head out of my ass and realized that aside from feeling insecure and fragile about the state of my relationship all the time, we also wanted entirely different things out of life! — Greg Behrendt

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason. — Alain De Botton

It seemed to k. as if all contact with him had been cut and he was more of a free agent than ever. He could wait here, in a place usually forbidden to him, as long as he liked, and he also felt as if he gad won that freedom with more effort than most people could manage to make, and no one could touch him or drive him away, why, they hardly had a right even to adress him. But at the same time - and this feeling was at least as strong - he felt as if there were nothing more meaningless and more desperate than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability. — Franz Kafka

Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria" - the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even unlikely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat? — Robert Charles Wilson

Powerlessness is dangerous. For most of us, the inability to affect change is a desperate feeling. We need resilience and hope and a spirit that can carry us through the doubt and fear. We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts. — Brene Brown

Hope is believing in something that eludes you. It's a desperate feeling in a desperate situation. — Carroll Bryant

And when I have that feeling, that feeling like I need a handout, desperate, I want to pull my skin off and turn into dust.I want to throw myself back to the angels and tell them to start over,start over without me cause you put the screws in loose, you put the hinges in wrong. — Andrea Portes

Unaware of Nina, the woman paused at the riverbank and looked out over the scar on the land where the water should run. Her expression sharpened, turned desperate as she reached down to touch the child in her arms. It was a look Nina had seen in woman all over the world, especially in times of war and destruction. A bone-deep fear for her child's future ... Someday her portraits would show the world how strong and powerful women could be, as well as the personal cost of that strength ...
She heard Danny come up beside her. "Hey, you."
She leaned against him, feeling food about her shots. "I just love how they are with their kids, even when the odds are impossible. The only time I cry is when I see their faces with their babies. Why is that, with all we've seen?"
"So it's mothers you follow. I thought it was warriors. — Kristin Hannah

I remember feeling guilty that I had a good childhood. I thought everybody who is famous has to have a desperate childhood and work his way out of it, but I had a great one. — Tomie DePaola

What we call society is the sum total of human thinking and feeling. It is a reflection of our attitudes. When we change them, we change society. We are only a change of mind away from real freedom, the freedom to express our God-given uniqueness and celebrate the diversity of gifts, perceptions and inspiration that exist within the collective human psyche. The creative force is within us all and desperate to express itself. — David Icke

A guilty conscience pushed me to try harder - which I did for what seemed like a tremendous amount of wasted time, staring bug-eyed at uncooperative pencils. What was missing? The answer seemed obvious - intense emotional incentive. But at the moment I didn't feel desperate or angry or afraid. Just severely bored out of my mind and guilt-ridden for feeling so mind-numbingly bored."
- from "Phantom's Veil — Richelle E. Goodrich

In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed - even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad. — David Byrne

The reason I regard training that involves the ki energy as crucial is because ki energy is the bridge that links our body and mind ... when you focus deeply inside on the ki energy, your mind becomes calm and serene. There's a feeling of peaceful comfort and safety that's hard to describe. Inside of that, there's no fear that you might lose something, there is no desperate need to control others, nor is there the desire for recognition or acceptance. There is only one self that is infinitely bright and peaceful and seems that for it anything would be possible. — Ilchi Lee

Still," I said, "I am sorry. But I was desperate to rescue my sister."
"I understand," the sagging dragon assured me. He explained, "I, too, had a sister, once."
The past tense didn't escape me. "What happened to her?" I asked, feeling we were connected, two of a kind after all, sharing similar personal tragedies.
"I had to eat her," the dragon said, "to keep her from stealing my gold. — Vivian Vande Velde

Children who feel unloved and unprotected are like a half-filled cup. They become incapable of 'filling up' because they have come to believe they are unworthy of love. They try to please others, give to others, and care for others in a desperate hope that they may make themselves worthy. — Beverly Engel

And I've fallen.
So hard.
I've hit the ground. Gone right through it. Never in my life have I felt this. Nothing like this. I've felt shame and cowardice, weakness and strength. I've known terror and indifference, self-hate and general disgust. I've seen things that cannot be unseen.
And yet I've known nothing like this terrible, horrible, paralyzing feeling. I feel crippled. Desperate and out of control. And it keeps getting worse. Every day I feel sick. Empty and somehow aching.
Love is a heartless bastard. — Tahereh Mafi

One of these days Princess, I promise you."
I turned to scowl at him once more, "I would never be desperate enough to want you." Okay that was a lie; my breaths were already quickening just feeling his sculpted body pressed against mine.
His smile was slow and sexy, "We'll see. — Molly McAdams

He's kissing me, quick desperate kisses, like I'm something he needs to live; and I'm kissing him back, crazy with the ache I feel for him, trying to kiss him better, trying to fix him. I'm touching his face, feeling the roughness of his beard, the wet of his tears, feeling the tremors passing through his body, hearing his ragged breathing. And each kiss is a failure. A failed attempt to escape from all that's happening. And I only know this when he slows, drawing it out, letting me taste regret, letting things linger. He pulls away, and I'm saying "Don't, don't, don't", trying to bring him back, kissing his face. But I've lost him. — Kirsty Eagar

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. — Yoko Ogawa

Love is not feeling, child, nor even the passion of lovers, which always seeks only its own gratification. It is the act of caring, of giving, the act of protecting the weak, the helpless, the imprisoned and the desperate. Love is the hand raised in defence. You cannot love and keep your hands clean. — Patricia Duncker

The Universal Consciousness's feeling is unqualified love for all of its creatures,no matter how foolish and desperate they act. — David V. Gaggin

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation. — Patrick O'Neil

I've fallen for her ... So hard. I've hit the ground. Gone right through it. Never in my life have if felt this. Nothing like this ... I've known nothing like this terrible, horrible, paralyzing feeling. I feel crippled. Desperate and out of control. And it keeps getting worse. Every day I feel sick. Empty and somehow aching. Love is a heartless bastard. I'm driving myself insane. — Tahereh Mafi

Maybe all these desperate clashing feelings I'm feeling are just random brain activity, maybe I'm just delusional. But there are things that I miss, and things that I feel like I should be seeing and feeling every time I turn around, and I just keep turning and turning and turning, and there's nothing. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

I kissed you because it was beautiful and you make me feel..." he bit out, his voice a harsh whisper. "You make me feel...crazy things. Desperate things. Impossible things. You make me feel. And feeling that much is irresistible sometimes. You are irresitible sometimes. — Amy Harmon

He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her. — Stephen King

Owing to a poorly defined sense of self, people with BPD rely on others for their feelings of worth and emotional caretaking. So fearful are they of feeling alone that they may act in desperate ways that quite frequently bring about the very abandonment and rejection they're trying to avoid. — Kimberlee Roth

In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state ... Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. — Kay Redfield Jamison

No matter what you're feeling or how desperate you become, always take a moral position. If you do that, God will watch over you. — Lisa See

I don't want to be a widow, I don't want Michael Bayning, and I don't want you to joke about such things, you tactless clodpole!"
As all three of them stared at her openmouthed, Poppy leapt up and stalked away, her hands drawn into fists.
Bewildered by the immediate force of her fury - it was like being stung by a butterfly - Harry stared after her dumbly. After a moment, he asked the first coherent thought that came to him. "Did she just say she doesn't want Bayning?"
"Yes," Win said, a smile hovering on her lips. "That's what she said. Go after her, Harry."
Every cell in Harry's body longed to comply. Except that he had the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff, with one ill-chosen word likely to send him over. He gave Poppy's sister a desperate glance. "What should I say?"
"Be honest with her about your feelings," Win suggested.
A frown settled on Harry's face as he considered that. "What's my second option? — Lisa Kleypas

In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. — Elizabeth Gilbert

If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is. — Gary Hume

Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature. — Stephen Jay Gould

She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people's wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious. — Neil Gaiman

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which
or, rather, all the more because
here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here.
Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself. — Haruki Murakami

My 20s were all about feeling desperate. Desperate to find a new boyfriend. Desperate to get the perfect job. Desperate to get rid of this terrible relationship with this bad new boyfriend. — Jessi Klein

He never hurries. He never shows his cards. He always hangs up first ... Like when we first started talking on the phone, he would always be the one who got off first. When we kissed, he always pulled away first. He always kept me just on the edge of crazy. Feeling like I wanted him too much, which just made me want him more ... [It was] excruciating and wonderful. It feels good to want something that bad. I thought about him the way you think about dinner when you haven't eaten for a day and a half. Like you'd sell your soul for it. — Rainbow Rowell

When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because they have no wood to burn, instead burn up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I know I suck," I whispered, looking her in the eye, feeling desperate. "I know I don't deserve you. Just don't leave me. Please? I'll be better, okay? Just don't leave me. — Kieran Scott

If you just take ... the feeling of legitimacy away from them, if you turn it around so they feel like they are committing a crime by watching ... they'll be confused and scared and worried and they'll just return to their ... quietly desperate lives. — John Green

And who could you tell about feeling ugly? You could tell no one, not without it seeming like the most desperate kind of bait. You said, Oh, I'm just terribly ugly, and everyone rushed in with their refusals, disallowing such - such what? Honesty? What a hollow and thoughtless gesture it was, to deny someone the acknowledgement of her own mediocrity. — Vincent Scarpa

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there had to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of such, their growing respect, their whispered asides, their opinion of him - all this trapped him into behaving as everything he knew he was not. As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation. — Richard Flanagan

From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had once more shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of a slight movement on her part towards him with the same tender and sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when they are nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady, relate, as significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we had made in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet to-morrow,"
although they themselves know that these things are meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. — Marcel Proust

They were all looking at Mary, and she felt more than ever like the new pupil at a school where they had high expectations of her. She also felt a strange flattery: the idea of herself as swift and darting and birdlike was new and pleasant, because she had always thought of herself as dogged and plodding. But along with that came the feeling that they'd got it terribly wrong, if they saw her like that; they didn't understand at all; she couldn't possibly fulfill this desperate hope of theirs. — Philip Pullman

I want to feel embarrassed by my desperation but I'm too busy feeling desperate. — Marley Jacobs

Her heart was pounding impossibly fast. Then she realized She was feeling both of their hearts, racing each other. A kind of desperate conversation, one they couldn't have with words. — Lauren Kate

All I want to say is that when you stop being delusional and start feeling desperate because you're too inept to figure this out on your own, you know who to come to. — Veronica Roth