#pair

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#future #heartbreak #hopelessness #past #sadness

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 Dostoyevsky

#darkness #despair #fall #heroes #hope

Courage is not the absence of fear or despair; it is the capacity to continue on despite them, no matter how great or overwhelming they become. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#despair #fear #courage

To die, so young to die. No, no, not I, I love the warm sunny skies, light, song, shining eyes, I want no war, no battle cry, No, no, not I. ↗

— Hannah Senesh

#defiance #determination #hope #hope-and-despair #inspiration

For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled. ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#despair #letting-go #life #moving-on #sadness

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death. ↗

— Roman Payne

#beauty #beauty-in-literature #beauty-in-nature #bed #death

How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over. ↗

— Edward Thomas

#despair #dying #ennui #life #death

Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward? How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive? ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#death #despair #life #death

She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel. ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#death #despair #hopeless #loneliness #death

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#despair #poetry #world