Adrienne Rich Quotes

You can't pay enough money to... cure that feeling of being broken and confused.

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

I want you to take away the hope because that's the thing that's killing me.

Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Despair is the only cure for illusion.

Despair is easy, or at least low cost.

If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.

Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

Stuart must have sensed my despair from the way I began lightly banging my forehead on the table.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Despair is the greatest of our errors.

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness

Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair.

I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.

I don't know how i stay on my feet, why i don;t just shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when i want it so badly to stop

You're not eating anything," said Marilla sharply, eying her as if it were a serious shortcoming. Anne sighed. I can't. I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?" I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say," responded Marilla. Weren't you? Well, did you ever try to IMAGINE you were in the depths of despair?" No, I didn't." Then I don't think you can understand what it's like. It's very uncomfortable a feeling indeed.

Safe Despair it is that raves- Agony is frugal. Puts itself severe away For its own perusal.

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

My mind was bursting with depression and anguish. I muttered imprecations and murmuring as I passed along. I was full of loathing and abhorrence of life, and all that life carries in its train.