James Wolcott Quotes

Revolutionaries were depressed and close to emotional breakdown; after the failure, they left successively.

It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.

In the current climate, we live in a pessimistic and non-idealistic world.

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.

'Weary Willie' is very real to me. He is a man who has given up. The boat has gone and left him. The cards are stacked against him. He's content to make out with what he's got. He knows he'll go no further.

My sweetest hope is to lose hope.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

I want you to take away the hope because that's the thing that's killing me.

Criticism and pessimism destroy families, undermine institutions of all kinds, defeat nearly everyone, and spread a shroud of gloom over entire nations.

A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air.

When you want something desperately and you lose it, no matter how hard you try to get yourself motivated, it's always difficult.

Young people who have no future will easily give up their future, which they can't see on the horizon.

Losing has an unbelievably negative impact on me.

Hopelessness is a feeling. It's not a fact.

Sometimes, what's helpful is to admit that we are discouraged and admit that we are at a loss.

I've lost a lot. I'm tired of it. It's not fun.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

I don't like to sing things that just sound like they're going straight down the tubes, and they're circling the drain, and there's no hope. It doesn't feel good in any way to sing.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

I certainly wouldn't say that my life is a disaster, but there have been moments where I've felt like that.

I am more weary of life, I think, than ever I was.