Will

“Joey laid his head on his arms and wept. What seemed trivial to others is the pure essence of Hell to the sufferer, and the incubus of realised cowardice is the worst that haunts manhood.

From that orgy of weakness and tears, Joey Donory rose with an iron resolve crystallising in his liquor-muddled brain. He had reached the state in which even the most trivial discomforts loom monstrously and deathly portent. And Joey's troubles were not trivial.”
― Robert E. Howard, Western Tales

“They won't fall for this.'
'They already have, sister. Holy wars are easier to start than rumours, amongst your Kind or mine...”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.

Has it?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”
― Dan Simmons, Drood