Desperation Quotes - Page 12

• Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Loyalty, Sports, Boxing

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.

  Beryl Markham

  Real, Night, Men

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.279, Open Road Media

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• I had NO interest in being a theologian, especially not a Christian, as I had been raised by progressive atheists. We bowed down every morning to the golden calf of the New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt. I tried to get my parents to respect and nourish me, let alone delight in me, so even though I secretly loved and believed in the Divine Something - Goodness, Good Orderly Direction, Gift of Desperation, the Cosmic Muffin - I wasn't ready yet to commit myself to the study of a higher power.

  Anne Lamott

  Christian, Morning, Atheist

  Source: www.cosmopolitan.com

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• Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

  Benazir Bhutto

  Religious, Political, Religion

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• Within legal enforcement of "morality," there is no sense of how to morally, ethically, or fairly help people live safer lives. It's all about banishment or punishment or forced destitution - all of which creates more desperation, and more social risk-taking by people in moments of crisis.

  Terre Thaemlitz

  Punishment, People, Risk

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.

  Lorrie Moore

  Reality, People, Giving

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. October 2005.

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• Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.

  Harold Speed

  Perfection, Rubbish, Advent

  Harold Speed (2012). “The Practice and Science of Drawing”, p.72, Courier Corporation

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• I sort of got into Westerns... It was a sort of desperation move, really. I had several pictures that didn't go very well, and I just realised that I would have to try something else.

  James Stewart

  Moving, Trying, Wells

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• American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

  James Carroll

  War, Hero, Air

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• I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

  Francis Bacon

  Passion, Artist, Feelings

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• There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.

  Ray LaMontagne

  Growing Up, Real, Poverty

  "Ray LaMontagne: Digging Deep And Doing What He Does" by Ellen Sterling, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 2, 2010.

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• The vast majority of the people who populate our planet live lives of quiet desperation that are all too often quite harsh and painful, lives in which events and circumstances usually don't turn out the way they had hoped or planned.

  Frederick Lenz

  Inspirational, Live Life, Buddhism

  Frederick Lenz (1994). “Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap”, Interglobal Seminars

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• The force that has overcome Europe and destroyed entire states within days could cope with us, a handful of youngsters. It was an act of desperation . . . We aspired to only one thing: to sell our lives for the highest possible price.

  Mordechaj Tenenbaum

  Europe, Holocaust, Overcoming

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• As an actor, it's all about whether you can sell the emotion on your face... that desperation, the panic and rage that comes with combat. The emotion of combat is important to me. I mean, you feel almost sick if you see a real fight where someone is getting badly beaten up. You can get emotionally involved in combat that has nothing to do with you in real-life, let alone if you are actually in it... or it's someone you know, and so you should have those same feelings on film.

  Joey Ansah

  Real, Mean, Fighting

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Writing, Pits, Next

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• A desperation to escape a problem is the wrong way. A passion to understand it is the right way

  Vernon Howard

  Passion, Way, Problem

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• I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.

  Jesse Ball

  Book, Pleasure

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops - in desperation as the siege's hunger bit - was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.

  Chris Cleave

  Wall, Men, Tree

  "'We Don't Know Our Hearts Until Life Puts Us to the Test' - Chris Cleave on 'Everyone Brave Is Forgiven'". Interview with Erin Kodicek, www.amazonbookreview.com. May 31, 2016.

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• Obviously we're doing a comedy [Fresh Hell], and our intent is to entertain, but we're also really aware and trying to stay aware of the subtext of what it's like to reach a certain age and be dismissed, basically, from the fraternity you've always wanted to be a part of, and the desperation involved in trying to claw your way back into it.

  Brent Spiner

  Trying, Age, Way

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I got tired and embarrassed by the constant poverty of those years. I told Doug [ Brinkley] this is really going to be a horrible downer of a book [The Proud Highway] if all it's going to be is about being broke. I didn't like being reminded of desperation at all times.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Book, Tired, Years

  Source: www.fargonebooks.com

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• That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it's something that's really there [in America] as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of desperation, in the hope of disrupting the power structure so they can live better lives. I think in those ways, it's intimately connected to today.

  Peter van Agtmael

  Thinking, America, People

  "Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like". Interview with Mark Murrmann, www.motherjones.com. February 25, 2017.

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• To a winner, complacency and overconfidence can be destructive. To losers, desperation and despondency are just as harmful.

  Bill Walsh

  Softball, Sports, Motivation

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• I think what's interesting about Alice Munro, too, is the extreme mundanity of things. And how even a life reduced to complete mundanity, like capitalism taking over rural Ontario or whatever, has complete sway over aspects of life. Nevertheless, people still have these moments of weird desperation, weird longing, weird true love, or weird, powerful lust, and that was a major inspiration for me, too.

  How to Dress Well

  Powerful, Inspiration, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Let a man go down as low as possible; there must come a time when out of sheer desperation he will take an upward curve and will learn to have faith in himself.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Faith, Men, Curves

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Practical Vedanta Philosophy”, p.10, editionNEXT.com

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• It is certainly true that cooking is therapeutic, creative and all those other faintly creepy self-helpish words. I would love to tell you that learning to cook was part of my journey toward actualization. I would love to tell Oprah this. I would love to tell Oprah this while weeping. But I learned to cook for a much simpler reason: in the abject hope that people would spend time with me if I put good things in their mouth. It is, in other words (like practically everything else I do), a function of my desperation for emotional connection and acclaim.

  Steve Almond

  Emotional, Journey, Self

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