“A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”
“That’s only three.”
Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.”

“There is no disappointment so numbing… as someone no better than you achieving more.”

Joseph Heller (1923–1999) American author

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“The Catholic writer really needs only three things to succeed: faith, hope and ingenuity”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

“Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

“In youth, what disappointments of our own making: in age, what disappointments from the nature of things.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

“There is many a thing which the world calls disappointment; but there is no such thing in the dictionary of faith. What to others are disappointments are to believers intimations of the will of God.”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

“Don't let what your parents do disappoint you.”

Richard Ford (1944) American novelist and short story writer

“Therefore, you must never be disappointed in life and you must remember that what even God cannot achieve, you can achieve through hard work. Karma is a thing, which can even change the course laid down by God.”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India