When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.
Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.
Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.
Helplessness is a mighty power.
When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.
It's one thing to be discouraged. It's another thing to have despair. Despair is when you think there's just no end to this [suffering]. There's no solution for this. Despair is when you think that your suffering has no purpose, and your suffering has no end.
Nothing made you feel so useless as another person's grief.
I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .
The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.
Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.
Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.
Despair puts the last touch not only to our misery but also to our weakness.
They kind of took it out of our hands. We're still able to deal with him on an emotional level.
Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic.
We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to reach for him across the hundreds and hundreds of miles, to send my thoughts into his mind, to let him know he is not alone. But he is. And I can't help him.
When there's something that impacts a family member or friend, that is difficult for them, you want to do what you can to help. Sometimes you can't do anything and it makes you feel like you're helpless, so those emotions cross a big barometer, but they're a big, broad stroke when it comes to someone who you care about. If you have compassion in your heart, you just care.
In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.
I don't like being approached by people who look at me too intensely, who needed something from me that I didn't have. I don't represent anything.
The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.
There was a period of time in Los Angeles when I wondered if I was just going to lose everything.
Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.
Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.
