All 19 Uses of
despair
in
Middlemarch
- Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.†
Chpt Prel
- She pressed her hands against the sides of her head and seemed to despair of her memory.†
Chpt 1
- It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea, thrilling her from despair into expectation.†
Chpt 1
- Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal.†
Chpt 1
- But having Mr. Featherstone's land in the background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.†
Chpt 2
- "Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a heaven in hell's despair.†
Chpt 3
- And when, looking up, her eyes met his dull despairing glance, her pity for him surmounted her anger and all her other anxieties.†
Chpt 3
- But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.†
Chpt 5 *
- That action of memory which he had tried to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly completed itself without conscious effort—a common experience, agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no value.†
Chpt 5
- To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more terrible than one of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance of the distance she was placing between them.†
Chpt 6
- He was so much cheered that he began to search for an account of experiments which he had long ago meant to look up, and had neglected out of that creeping self-despair which comes in the train of petty anxieties.†
Chpt 7
- Lydgate did not speak, but tossed his head on one side, and twitched the corners of his mouth in despair.†
Chpt 7
- She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face; but then the tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled.†
Chpt 7
- He had begun to question her with the intent that their conversation should disperse the chill fog which had gathered between them, but he felt his resolution checked by despairing resentment.†
Chpt 8
- They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate going about what work he had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond feeling, with some justification, that he was behaving cruelly.†
Chpt 8
- He spoke curtly, feeling the ache of despair as to his being able to carry out any purpose that Rosamond had set her mind against.†
Chpt 8
- In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man—she besought hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.†
Chpt 8
- …of an answering smile, here within the vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had trusted—who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness was a parting vision: she discovered her passion to herself in the unshrinking utterance of despair.†
Chpt 8
- But there were strong cords pulling him back from that abrupt departure: the blight on his happiness in thinking of Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance which was also despair.†
Chpt 8
Definition:
-
(despair as in: she felt despair) hopelessness; or distress (such as extreme worry or sadness from feeling powerless to change a bad situation)