“How was it possible for the world to be so beautiful and so cruel at the same time?”

“How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd…”

Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) French novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz

“How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.”

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) English composer, conductor, and pianist

“I don't know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

“How did we become so intrigued by risk – and so worried about it at the same time?”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

“There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

Gore Vidal book Julian

“We all didn't come into to the world at the same time so it makes sense that we don't leave it at the same time.”

Lurlene McDaniel (1944) American writer