Home > Topic > the desperation
1 " Fine!' she snapped, the desperation to have him growing exponentially now. 'I missed you. Only you. No man could ever make me feel like you do. I'm ruined for all others. I renamed all my vibrators after you and none of them get me off like you can. Happy now?'His eyes glazed for a second. '*All* your vibrators?'-Convicted "
― , Undercover Lovers
2 " Be discerning with rumors on leaders, for most are birthed by the envy of the idle or the desperation of the defeated. "
― Orrin Woodward
3 " These young ones. They do not understand. There are so few of us left who remember how destructive rebellion is. The slaughter after the Golden Calf was worshiped. The thousands who died. The firestorm that burned the outer rim of camp when the foreigners among us incited a riot. They take for granted the miraculous water that feeds this multitude. They have eaten the manna every day of their lives and do not see the utter strangeness of it. They have not felt the desperation of thirst or the hopelessness of hunger. All they do is complain, "
― Connilyn Cossette , Wings of the Wind (Out From Egypt, #3)
4 " When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel andsteam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in theback of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing onit, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feelslike my whole life is holding its breath.By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see thetrain. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. Itis the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid.He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. Ifeel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches atmy shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, theneed to scream or cry rising in my throat.And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps fallingout into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Outinto the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows.And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of myspine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feelthe deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones.It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome andinappropriate with her stories of our frolicking.And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. Thedarkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flatagainst the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place?Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I rememberthe problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with.But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images ofthe days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then,patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to bedeciphered.Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep youreyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light ofthe stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in arush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing ofthe telephone.When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a personsleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curlup on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse.Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in anattic.The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from theundercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all thesenoises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is afabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feelas if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, orat least not just a train.The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak ofshoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’sbreathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past,rolling gurneys down florescent hallways. "
5 " He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut. "
― Salman Rushdie , The Satanic Verses
6 " At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddle it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them into depressives, and would still have some left over. Because he no longer knew what to do with so much sadness. And sometimes he didn't even know what to do with himself. "
― Filippo Bologna , The Parrots
7 " You want me.”“Want does not begin to describe the way I feel about you,” his low voice promised. “Want is nothing compared with the level of desire I have. With the desperation I feel. With the way I long for you. "
― Sarah MacLean , No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (The Rules of Scoundrels, #3)
8 " Men believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe learned most of his practical knowledge – how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip – from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself speak. "
― Neal Stephenson , Cryptonomicon
9 " Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions. Everything is a half truth!That's the whole problem! You can't understand me through the smog of your presumptions and prejudices. Multiply that six billion times and you'll begin to understand the desperation of our global situation "
― Tony Vigorito , Just a Couple of Days
10 " He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since—no matter what business venture he thinks up. "
― Toni Morrison , Paradise (Beloved Trilogy, #3)
11 " All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of " learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of " learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor. "
12 " Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble. "
― David Mitchell , Cloud Atlas