"It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer flats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become so used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it." - Lemony Snicket
"My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes." - L.M. Montgomery
"The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead." - Anne Rice
"I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell[...]" - Elizabeth Gaskell
"There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares."
- Richelle E. Goodrich
"She wondered that hope was so much harder than despair." - Patricia Briggs
"The pain is part of being human... The fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength."
- Dumbledore
