“If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.”

“You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.
You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.”

Lisa Gardner (1956) American author

“Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.”

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) American writer

“If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.”

Gordon Ramsay (1966) British chef, writer and TV presenter

“The nation has come to the end of its psychological endurance. Many people are beginning to despair. Now it is not days but hours that separate us from a national catastrophe. Honesty compels one to ask the question: Did things have to come to this?”

Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014) Polish military officer and politician

“You have a great heart, but will only find it to be so through great pain. This is the wisdom of love, and its doubtful gift…. I have endured much suffering and still remain unbitter and unclosed.”

Alison Croggon (1962) contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist

“Unwinding a habit that you have allowed to entangle you can be difficult. But the power is in you. Do not despair.”

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) American Mormon leader

“Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

“Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare;
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet