Far from home, in my cheerless hotel room, I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.
"I am in despair looking around the world at the moment" she told me.
"Watching a film like Neds felt like watching Peter Mullan looking back in despair, looking for reasons for what happened to him.
We never find hope by scouring the world, Diogenes-like, peering into the dark corners of despair, looking for reasons why hope might be justified.
How many times in a lifetime do we streak off in a direction contrary to the call we hear in our heart, only to find ourselves tempest-tossed, downcast, and at the point of despair, looking prayerfully upward from an abject situation, resolving to do better if only given another shot, and in the end wind up giving thanks for the tremendous miracle of a second chance!
As shown in Morley's film, depression and despair look inscribed in the grim red brickwork of Wood Green Shopping City.
When he heard the dreadful word, he emitted a shrill, heart-rending cry of despair, looked around him, as though eagerly seeking something, then turned to flee and rushed with outspread arms against a wall of the court, writhing, and scratching it as though trying to force an entrance between the stones, like a [polyp] clinging to a rock.
Knapp returned to the court carrying two bags of ice and, although Sharapova broke serve in the first game, the third seed cast despairing looks towards new coach Sven Groeneveld when she was broken straight back.
It is hard to ward off despair when looking at the cast of political players in this drama: the cynical, the racist, the exhausted.
Years of war and murder had left Iraqis so thoroughly degraded, Makiya argued, that, once freed, they would throw off the tired orthodoxies of Arab politics and, in their despair, look to the West.
Watch the man toil on the asphalt in despair, look at him desperately reach one clumsy hand forward through the evolution of man towards Bolt a superhuman, a person and then some, a man born 250, 300 years before his time and you will immediately know what you are.
