Now you will rest, tired heart, forever. Finished
Is your last fantasy, which I felt sure
Would endure forever. It's finished. I know in my bones
That hope and even desire are cold
For any further fond illusions.
Stay easy forever. You've been
Throbbing long enough. Nothing is worth
This beating and beating; the earth
Doesn't deserve a sigh. Life is nothing
But blankness of spirit, a bitter taste, and the world
Mud. Now rest in peace. Despair
For the last time. Fate gave our kind
No gift but death. Cast a cold eye now
On yourself, on nature, on that hideous hidden force
That drives all things to their destruction,
And the infinite all is vanity of it all.


----Giacomo Leopardi


For of the wise man as of the fool there is no remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise man dies just like the fool! So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a striving after wind.


----Ecclesiastes, or the preacher


Who really cares,
Who's willing to try
To save a world
That is destined to die?

----Marvin Gaye


Count over the joys thine hours have seen
Count over thy days from anguish free
And know whatever thou hast been
'Tis something better not to be

----Lord Byron


More pain inside of my brain
Than in the eyes of a little girl
Inside of a plane
Aimed at the World Trade....

----Eminem


...to despair is to descend into hell.

----St. Isidore of Seville


God wears down and destroys the spiritual substance of the soul and swallows it up in a darkness so deep and black that the soul, in the face of its misery, feels itself annihilated and bereft of consciousness through a spiritual death. It is as if it were gulped down into the dark belly of a monster, where it feels as if it were being digested.

----St. John of the Cross, "The Dark night of the Soul"


And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

----the Book of Jonah


I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism.

----St. Therese of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church


My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

----Jesus Christ, Son of God


Christ, too, more than all the saints, was condemned and abandoned. He did not, as some pretend, suffer only lightly but really and truly gave himself over, for our benefit, to God the Father and to eternal damnation.

----Martin Luther


...liberation lies in the fact that the human destiny of death is undergirded by the death of Jesus Christ.

----Hans Urs von Balthasar