Feeling Pathetic Quotes & Sayings

My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung. — Toby Young

Light the Christmas candles for your children! Let them sing carols! But don't delude yourselves, don't content yourselves year after year with the shabby, pathetic, sentimental feeling you have when you celebrate your holidays! Demand more of yourselves! Love and joy and the mysterious thing we call "happiness" are not over here or over there, they are only "within yourselves. — Hermann Hesse

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady ... I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others? — Sylvia Plath

Someone could have told me," he finally said, feeling and sounding both miserable and pathetic. "Oh, honey, I knew you were dumb, but this was beyond my expectations. — Ashlyn Kane

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream ... he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic. — Barack Obama

With tears and prayers and tender hands, Mother and sisters made her ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again, seeing with grateful eyes the beautiful serenity that soon replaced the pathetic patience that had wrung their hearts so long, and feeling with reverent joy that to their darling death was a benignant angel, not a phantom full of dread. — Louisa May Alcott

And I am sick and tired of feeling pathetic. — Amy Reed

There's nothing like that feeling of waiting for a guy. It's the loneliest feeling in the world. Holding that cell phone in your hand as you take out the trash, use the bathroom, change the litter box. Fearful that the one second you aren't looking will be when they call. Pathetic. And something I have done as recently as last week. — Hilary Winston

For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin. — Thomas Ligotti

Look, Neal, Hawaii is not some magical pixie wonderland; it's an American state populated by atomic weapons, a remnant native population and people too stupid to spell their way out of a paper bag. Most of them came here to escape pathetic lives in the forty nine other states, so in some sense, Hawaii is a scenic cul-de-sac filled with people who want to drink themselves to death without feeling judged. — Douglas Coupland

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy. — Scott Alexander

Strange indeed is human nature. Here were these men, to whom murder was familiar, who again and again had struck down the father of the family, some man against whom they had no personal feeling, without one thought of compunction or of compassion for his weeping wife or helpless children, and yet the tender or pathetic in music could move them to tears. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I tried to convince myself, too, but I was a much tougher sell because I knew the truth. I was so very not okay. I realized that I was going to feel shitty either way. I was probably going to feel shitty for the rest of my life, a life I should not even still be living. A life that should have let me go. So I got angry. Then I got very angry. Then I got angrier still. But you can only go so long being angry before you learn to hate. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and started hating instead. Whining was pathetic, but hate got things done. Hate strengthened my body and shaped my resolve and what I resolved to do was to get revenge. Hate seemed pretty damn healthy to me. - Nastya Kashnikov — Katja Millay

The white man knows many things," the other whispered back, "but he doesn't know how to tell a good lie. — Okey Ndibe

I had wanted to call him.
There were so many things I wanted to talk to him about.
And that I wanted to ask him about. But ... I kind of hated myself ... for feeling that way.
Because ... thinking about Nomiya-san ... felt like a betrayal of myself, of everything I'd felt for the past six years.
It made my feelings for Mayama seem like a lie.
Other people might think it's pathetic.
That I'm pathetic.
But my feelings for Mayama ...
My love for him ...
Was the only thing I had.
It was my treasure. My cold, bright treasure.
Dear God. I never wanted to be saved. I wanted to stay miserably in love with Mayama forever.
I wanted to stay in love with him for ten years, twenty years, so he would know just how strong my love was.
... Even though I knew that would be totally meaningless. — Chica Umino

The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard. — Jean Baudrillard

The hell of it is, I know the answer. The answer is that you never, ever, rely on another person for your peace of mind. If you do, you're screwed but good. Not right away, maybe, but sooner or later. You have to
I don't know
you have to learn to live with yourself. You have to learn to turn back your own sheets and set a table for one without feeling pathetic. You have to be strong and confident and pleased with yourself and never give the slightest impression that you can't hack it without that certain goddamn someone. You have to fake the hell out of it. — Armistead Maupin

Man ... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has ... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love ... — Lionel Trilling

People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling. — Lyn Hejinian

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. — William Hazlitt

You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot. — Douglas Adams

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea. — Matthew Zapruder

Sometimes the tasks we take on seem virtually impossible. But amazingly, when we harness the incredible power of the subconscious in our lives, we can accomplish whatever we set out to do, no matter what obstacles we have to overcome. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

But this time I can be gratefuk (really, I am) that I don't have anything to throw overboard. A great feeling. The only thing I could possibly throw overboard would be myself. Not such a bad idea, throwing myself overboard. No, this is getting to sound pathetic. The idea itself, though, isn't pathetic in the least. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. It only sounds that way when I write it down. — Haruki Murakami

And the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their egos by a show of tumult and conceit which is truly nauseating. As Shakespeare put it: ... man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / ... Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep. — Dale Carnegie

Still, I was thinking that this was all wrong, despite feeling so nice, for once again one of my most sacred and deepest erotic fantasies was brutally being shattered, and once more it was all because of Ami. After all, it had been one of my fondest dreams, as a teenager, to lie in bed cuddling with a cute girl, or even with Yumi. Of course, in those many imaginations, we were both naked and we were having wild passionate sex as well as cuddling, but there before me at that very moment was the sad pathetic reality. — Andrew James Pritchard