It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.
What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.
Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.
Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy.
The things that break your heart when you think there's nothing left to break
And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.
I got my heart broken. My spirit got shattered and mutilated. I will not be coming back from this. I don’t want to.
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.
It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart.
I just felt as though I would never be happy again, and as if I had fallen into a big black hole.
I feel the monster of grief again, writhing in the empty space where my heart and stomach used to be. I gasp, pressing both palms to my chest. Now the monstrous thing has its claws around my throat, squeezing my airway. I twist and put my head between my knees, breathing until the strangled feeling leaves me.
I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day!
Sometimes, love feels like a life or death situation. Losing true love is pretty much as bad as it gets, other than actually dying or losing good health. Most people know that. Most people can relate. It's like the end of the world.
Laurie felt just then that his heart was entirely broken and the world a howling wilderness.
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
My heart shattered. My world shattered
Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.
O wretched state! o bosom black as death!
for my grief's so great That no supporter but the huge firm earth Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. (Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1)
Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?
