Reading Despair Quotes & Sayings

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are. — Adam Zagajewski

I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden
very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain
full of balsam and tang
I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully
I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one
it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake. — L.M. Montgomery

Despair IS the greatest sin,' Dr. Nuttham finally responded slowly. 'It involves forgetting that God is there. Forgetting that He is good and that all He is and does eXtends from and works toward this perfect goodness. That doesn't mean that He allows evil, or creates it, or perpetuates it. That's our entwinement. Rather, He uses even our evil toward His good. We all need forms of remembering this first great love ... writing, reading, creating, BEING. — Carolyn Weber

But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair. — Oscar Wilde

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair. — Mark Twain

In state of deep depression, I stayed alone; my time was occupied with reading sacred books. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair. — Sarah J. Maas

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures. — Harold Bloom

My subconscious rolls her eyes at me in despair and goes back to reading her dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre. — E.L. James

I often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what they're really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted, can bring to readers a connection to the wonder of life. A good novel shows how life can and ought to be lived. It not only entertains but energizes and uplifts readers. — Terry Goodkind

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie. — Nikita Dudani

The only advantage he could see in the change was that he had a small desk in his room; his capacity for isolation was thereby increased. But none of this changed his life very much. He continued his games of billiards and his reading. And was periodically overwhelmed by abominable fits of despair from which he was abruptly extricated by a ridiculous but stubborn optimism, an absurd love of life. — Raymond Queneau

Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life. — Nicola Yoon

But what I really long to know you do not tell either: what you feel, although I've given you hints by the score of my regard. You like me. You wouldn't waste time or paper on a being you didn't like. But I think I've loved you since we met at your mother's funeral. I want to be with you forever and beyond, but you write that you are too young to marry or too old or too short or too hungry
until I crumple your letters up in despair, only to smooth them out again for a twelfth reading, hunting for hidden meanings. — Gail Carson Levine

Sometimes I do readings and people can't stop laughing, but I'm reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It's despair - just keep laughing, until you are dead. — Alina Bronsky

I often imagine what sort of position Nightwing might seek out were she not currently torturing us as headmistress of Spence Academy for Young Ladies. Dear Sirs, her letter might begin. I am writing to inquire about your advert for the position of Balloon Popper. I have a hatpin that will do the trick neatly and bring about the wails of small children everywhere. My former charges will attest to the fact that I rarely smile, never laugh, and can steal the joy from any room simply by entering and bestowing upon it my unique sense of utter gloom and despair. My references in this matter are impeccable. If you have not fallen into a state of deep melancholia simply by reading my letter, please respond to Mrs. Nightwing (I have a Christan name but no one ever has leave to use it) in care of Spence Academy for Young Ladies. If you cannot be troubled to find the address on your own, you are not trying your very best. Sincerely, Mrs. Nightwing. — Libba Bray

The article said that Kevin Keegan was an extrovert while Kenny Dalglish was an introvert.
Just seeing the word introvert threw me into despair.
Was I an introvert?
Wasn't I?
Didn't I cry more than I laughed? Didn't I spend all my time reading in my room?
That was introverted behavior, wasn't it?
Introvert, introvert, I didn't want to be an introvert.
That was the last thing I wanted to be, there could be nothing worse.
But I was an introvert, and the insight grew like a kind of mental cancer within me.
Kenny Dalglish kept himself to himself.
Oh, so did I! But I didn't want that. I wanted to be an extrovert! An extrovert! — Karl Ove Knausgard

Every book is a revolution. Books are our ticket out of boredom, despair, loneliness - but also ignorance. — Heidi Cullinan

A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition. — Michael Silverblatt

The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels. — Anatole Broyard

Common sense should tell us that reading is the ultimate weapon
destroying ignorance, poverty and despair before they can destroyus. A nation that doesn't read much doesn't know much. And a nation that doesn't know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box and the voting booth ... The challenge, therefore, is to convince future generations of children that carrying a book is more rewarding than carrying guns. — Jim Trelease

THE BALLAD OF READING GOAL: The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there. Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair. — Emma Goldman

Writing this, he had reached the pit of despair and he thought that reading it, she would at least begin to sense his tragedy and her part in it. It was not that she had ever forced her way on him. That had never been necessary. Her way had simply been the air he breathed and when at last he had found other air, he couldn't survive in it. He felt that even if she didn't understand at once, the letter would leave her with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was. — Flannery O'Connor

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine. — Malcolm Gladwell

When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis. — Rollo May

Pretty soon ... do you realize there'll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody'll give up reading in despair-There'll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they'll have to have a giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading- Seventy Million Million Kotis! - Whoopee! - Everything is free! — Jack Kerouac

Sonechka, meanwhile, placid soul that she was - cocooned by the thousand volumes of her reading, lulled by the hazy murmurings of the Greek myths, the hypnotically shrill recorder fluting of the Middle Ages, the misty windswept yearning of Ibsen, the minutely detailed tedium of Balzac, the astral music of Dante, the siren song of the piercing voices of Rilke and Novalis, seduced by the moralistic despair of the great Russian writers calling out to the heart of heaven itself - this placid soul had no awareness that her great moment was at hand. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

The world is full of disappointment," I said.
"Yes," she said, "I heard him say that. And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?"
"No," I said. "There's more than that."
"Like what?"
"Like good books," I said, "and good people. And good librarians, who are almost both at once. — Lemony Snicket

Like the roller coaster of life ... novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop. — Carmen DeSousa

It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading. — Michel Houellebecq

A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories. — Rebecca McNutt

Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn't go on if you didn't hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away. — Jean Rhys