Community Quote by Derek Walcott

“(...) nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness,…

— Thomas Mann

“...nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.”

— Thomas Mann

“I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases.…

— Khushwant Singh

“After all, life was like that for most of us – the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather…

— Barbara Pym

“When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt,…

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.”

— Don DeLillo

“I was seeking within myself the human being I had so long lost sight of, hoping that my passion had only been distorted but…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that the only…

— Quentin Crisp

The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep,and to study; its…

— Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

“Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or worse, you left…

— Magnus Flyte

“I look at this life and see the arrogance and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, the horrible…

— Anton Checkov

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do…

— Janet Frame