"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead."
— Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat)

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."
— Anaïs Nin

"In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life"
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Life begins on the other side of despair."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"He knew one of the women well, and had shared his universe with her. They had seen the same mountains, and the same trees, although each of them had seem them differently. She knew his weaknesses, his moments of hatred, of despair. Yet she was there at his side. They shared the same universe."
— Paulo Coelho (The Valkyries)

"...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance."
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure. "
— Philip Pullman (Clockwork)

"Patience – A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue."
— Ambrose Bierce

"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."
— Shostakovich

"Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?"
— Jim Butcher (Storm Front)

"I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart."
— Mitch Albom

"It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait."
— Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)

"That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
— Douglas Adams

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
— Douglas Adams

"The problem with designing something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"The major problem- one of the major problems, for there are several- one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of whom manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"A learning experience is one of those things that says, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.""
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)

"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
— Douglas Adams

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."
— Douglas Adams

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
— Douglas Adams

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"What to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue: Consider yourself lucky that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your present circumstances seems more likely, consider yourself lucky that it won't be troubling you much longer."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1)

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
— Douglas Adams

"I don't want to die! I've still got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!"
— Douglas Adams

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
— Douglas Adams

"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet."
— Douglas Adams

"If I ever meet myself, I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me."
— Douglas Adams

"'Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.'

'Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that.'"
— Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything)

""So this is it. We're going to die."
"Yes...except...No! Wait a minute, what's this switch?"
"What? Where?"
"No, I was only fooling. We are going to die after all." "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
— Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

""You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.""
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bog-gglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"
— Douglas Adams

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively usual thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have."
— Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels & One Story)

"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"When you blame others, you give up your power to change."
— Douglas Adams

"Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn't Have A Good Answer To."
— Douglas Adams

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
— Douglas Adams