Quotes about Disillusionment

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

I could tell you tales of cobbler's wax which would disgust you with human nature.

Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.

There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!

But he is now suddenly untouched by its charms. He seems for the first time to sense that there might be something more. Something is troubling him that he's only just beginning to sense, whose shape he can hardly yet make out in the dim light.

If it turns out that the thing we believed in or wanted to believe in is not true and real, we may experience a momentary letdown, but in the end we will be in a far better place than if we had blindly clung to something that was really just wish-fulfillment.

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn.

You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything.