"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it...always."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead."
— Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat)

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
— T.S. Eliot

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
— Haruki Murakami

"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."
— Shostakovich

"'Is there any good news?' Tesla said.
'Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?'"
— Clive Barker (The Great and Secret Show)

"Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing."
— Joseph Conrad (The Secret Sharer and other stories)

"She wondered that hope was so much harder then despair."
— Patricia Briggs (Cry Wolf)

"There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

"Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. "
— Paul Rogat Loeb (The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear)

"Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties."
— Aesop

"It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it."
— Lemony Snicket (The End)

"You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first."
— T.S. Eliot

"The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly: any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc - is assured to be noticed.

--The sickness unto death"
— Søren Kierkegaard

"My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness."
— Anthony Swofford (Jarhead)

"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."
— Shostakovich

"'You see, we cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.' He paused, considering what he had just said. 'Yes', he repeated. 'In the end, it's all a question of balance.'"
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is a ll closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go. "
— May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)

"“What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?” "
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair."
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)

"And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe."
— Anton Checkov (The Bet)

"The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination."
— Marion Zimmer Bradley

"I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"Men just like the ones who killed his mother and father had now murdered an archbishop in a cathedral, as if to prove, beyond all possibility of doubt, that there was no authority that could prevail against the tyranny of a man with a sword (958)."
— Ken Follett (The Pillars of the Earth)

"I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe for the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember, once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clasped her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann....' It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this."
— Patrick Branwell Brontë

"Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion"
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart)

"Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out."
— Leonid Andreyev

"But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair."
— Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory)

"Christ! What are patterns for?"
— Amy Lowell (Selected Poems of Amy Lowell)

"I waited patiently for the Lord and He inclined unto me and He heard my cry. He lifted me out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay,and He has set my feet upon a ROCK and He established my steps, and He has given me a a new song even praise unto our God; many shall see it and fear and shall trust in the Lord...the first 3 lines of an ancient Hebrew song Psalm 40:1-3"
— King David

"To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair."
— James Hillman (Suicide and the Soul)

"As it is the moment of truth, it is also the moment of despair, because there is no hope."
— James Hillman (Suicide and the Soul)

"You'll need hope, a hope as deep as despair"
— David Clemmet-Davies

"the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life."
— Émile Michel Cioran (On the Heights of Despair)