"This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game."

Despair, Suffering, Existence, Reality

19

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game."

Exlpore more Despair quotes

"I knew I was catching at straws; but in the wide and weltering deep where I found myself, I would have caught at cobwebs."

Charlotte Bronte, British Novelist

Despair, Desperation, Hope, Survival, Faith

"I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself."

Laurie Halse Anderson, American Author

Despair, Self, Isolation, Pain

"We destroy ourselves when we are ignorant or decide to live in ignorance."

Sunday Adelaja, Nigerian Author

Despair, Ignorance, Destruction, Awareness, Consequences

"It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world."

John Fowles, English Novelist

Despair, Violence, Humanity, Ethics

"Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss."

Alexandre Dumas, French Dramatist

Despair, Feeling, Man

"Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die."

John Green, American Author

Despair, Self, Hate, Emotion, Truth

"So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all."

Charles Bukowski, American Author

Despair, Addiction, Waiting, Isolation

"When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make."

James Weldon Johnson, American Poet

Despair, London, Man, Paris

"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."

Rebecca Solnit, American Actress

Despair, Certainty, Future, Emotion

"I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything."

Robin Hobb, American Author

Despair, Sensitivity, Regret, Self-Worth, Sadness

Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt

"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."

Time

"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."

Time

"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."

Criticism

"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."

People

"Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture."

Perception

"We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people " the ancients no less than us " have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self."

Control

"When we are sad-at least I am like this-it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change."

Comfort

"Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in."

Luck

"In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out."

Work

"When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change."

Comfort