Top 1200 Quiet Desperation Quotes & Sayings - Page 7

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Last updated on April 22, 2025.
Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.
My father has been a voice of encouragement in times of desperation for so many people. But he died when I was so young that, for me, his music has been a way for me to get to know him better.
Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.
There's nothing less funny than somebody trying to be funny. I loved Jack Dee, then I met him and I became the least funny human to exist because of my desperation to say something amusing.
So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.
I felt, if I'm going to take on some of the most overdone material, which is men and women and affairs and betrayal of friends, I had better have a new take on it. I think my films come from a desperation not to be boring.
I want people who have received a diagnosis of Hepatitis C to know that they didn't just receive a death sentence. They do have options, even if the person who gave them their diagnosis isn't aware of all of them. The path they choose doesn't have to be one of desperation.
I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn't terrified--really genuinely brave. Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn't want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly.
From the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies, and if he is well armed he will have good friends, and affairs will always remain quiet within when they are quiet without, unless they should have been already disturbed by conspiracy; and even should affairs outside be disturbed, if he has carried out his preparations and has lived as I have said, as long as he does not despair, he will resist every attack.
I've definitely had the long stretches of time in my personal life where I've felt an intense loneliness and a desperation to feel something real and to have something that truly meant something in my life.
If falling into desperation worked to make things better, then I would say, 'Let's all jump into despair.' But it doesn't help. The only way to truly find meaning and fulfillment is to look at the disaster, the pain, the difficulty, and know with complete certainty that good can come from this.
We don't attack any veteran, at all, ever, for their service record. We thank them. And the fact that somebody wanted to do that for political gain, shows the desperation of which some people unfortunately in the Republican Party want to keep and seize power.
I choose to rise up out of that storm and see that in moments of desperation, fear, and helplessness, each of us can be a rainbow of hope, doing what we can to extend ourselves in kindness and grace to one another. And I know for sure that there is no them - there's only us.
As in all matters involving love, which has so many different meanings, you find that the feeling that we label 'love' is not a simple feeling, it's a very complex one. Under the heading 'love' can come all sorts of rage and desperation.
I pu my finger to her lips. "You have to hush a minute so that I can tell you something." "What?" she says, bites my finger. I look at her. "I love you." She gets quiet, the kind of quiet that sinks into her, softens her. "Well that works out," she finally says, her voice deeper and breathless, her eyes moist, "because I love you too." She turns, leans against my arm, and settles into me.
Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.
Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.
The people at the record company had asked me if I could write a song about my life, my relationship with God, and where I'm from. Well, I can't write a song on purpose, my songs come in a moment of inspiration or desperation.
I found meditation. It was more out of pure desperation: I just started to wake up at 5 and sit for one hour, and suddenly, day after day, piece by piece, I could really feel I was coming back into me.
Desperation is the perfume of the young actor. It's so satisfying to have gotten rid of it. If you keep smelling it, it can drive you crazy. In this business a lot of people go nuts, go eccentric, even end up dead from it. Not my plan.
Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.
I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.
When you're first-generation money, you want to say, "I got a Mercedes and a Rolls and a Lamborghini. Take a look." When you're second-generation money, you're very quiet behind your country club doors. I think that's why people are much more aware. It's the first-generation wives that have the huge rings and the second-generation says, "Everyone be quiet as we get on our yacht or our private plane."
My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.
It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.
I'm not a grunter, I'm relatively quiet. There's a little bit of breathing out. Some people get really loud! There's a little bit of psyching up sometimes, if you're going for a really heavy weight you might make a little noise, but when lifting, I try and keep it quite quiet - I'm not a fan of male noise in that way to be totally honest. I think when girls do it it's not as bad, but when guys do it it's just like, 'Come on mate, hold it in!'.
Killing yourself is a major commitment, it takes a kind of courage. Most people just lead lives of cowardly desperation. It's kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.
It has always been a sign of desperation that racial-preference supporters argue that the government can honor the constitutional mandate not to discriminate on the basis of race only by discriminating on the basis of race.
When you collect bad loans... you sure learn a lot about making good ones. You also learn a lot about the power of persuasion, persistence and desperation. — © John Stumpf
When you collect bad loans... you sure learn a lot about making good ones. You also learn a lot about the power of persuasion, persistence and desperation.
And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.
Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.
Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
You're getting like an attitude. What you get put through for just wanting something more out of life. Makes you vulnerable. Inside, that tug of desperation, trying not to be excited, maybe this is it, and it's usually freaks and you want to shout I'm not like you.
Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.
When I was in High School I fell for pretty much any girl I ever met. But I was so desperate that I couldn't get any of them because they sensed my desperation! After many, many years, I learned to relax and just be myself.
I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get. — © Deb Caletti
I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.
If you, who are organised by Divine Providence for spiritual communion, refuse, and bury your talent in the earth, even though you should want natural bread, sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity.
It's really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space--that's the way life was meant to be. You're supposed to be too late for some things. Don't worry about it.
If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
Soft you day, be velvet soft, My true love approaches, Look you bright, you dusty sun, Array your golden coaches. Soft you wind, be soft as silk My true love is speaking. Hold you birds, your silver throats, His golden voice I'm seeking. Come you death, in haste, do come My shroud of black be weaving, Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet, My true love is leaving.
I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness - they're heartbreaking.[...] What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger.
You cry out in your sleep - all my failings expose. There's a taste in my mouth, as desperation takes hold Just that something so good just can't function no more. When love, love will tear us apart again.
For when last need to desperation driveth, Who dareth most he wiseth counsel giveth. [It., Che spesso avvien che ne' maggior perigli Son piu audaci gli ottimi consigli.]
You might as well ask why a middle-aged man with no criminal record might put a paper bag over his head and rob a bank. I acted out of personal desperation.
It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation.
On numerous visits to Manhattan, I have found myself poking around the city trying to find a moment of quiet and once located a hint of it in Central Park during a windless, late-night snowfall. There I stood absolutely still in the lemon glow of the city, a sky full of snow. The city still roared from all sides, a thousand noises compressed down to just one. I counted that distant, mild roar as quiet, a welcome relief from the more pressing noises of the daytime city.
There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this. And out of this sense of desperation and pathological religion, there develops an all-encompassing drive to harm and hurt, without regard for the innocent and the uninvolved, which was the case in New York.
Roger Waters isn't a "great" singer but he's always able to communicate this intense desperation. At times he's not even singing, but shouting. There's no melody and his shouting isn't even in key with the song.
aloof, adj. It has always been my habit, ever since junior high school, to ask that question: “What are you thinking?” It is always an act of desperation, and I keep on asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to.
Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another - desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide.
As regards the quietude of the sage, he is not quiet because quietness is said to be good. He is quiet because the multitude of things cannot disturb his quietude. When water is still, one's beard and eyelashes are reflected in it. A skilled carpenter uses it in a level to obtain a measurement. If still water is so clear, how much more are the mental faculties! The mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth in which all things are reflected.
I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side.
My parents were lenient. My mother believed God was another word for nature. I took up Satanism not out of desperation, but out of logic. I rebelled, not but because of a religious or repressive childhood. I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion.
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
I would still ask the government not to drive the people of India to desperation, or else there is no other course left open to the people except to inaugurate the policy of non-cooperation, though not necessarily the programme of Mr. Gandhi.
I take a deep breath. I'm not sure where that swell of desperation came from, but know that I've acknowledge it, it's impossible to ignore, like a living thing has awakened from a long sleep inside me. It writhes in my stomach and throat. I need to leave. I need the truth.
Desperation is the secret to my steady employment. I am not interested in downtime. I really like to keep working all the time and I always feel like I'm in the mail room of life; working up.
I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers - because males have got to try and justify their existence.
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