“What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”

“The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

“It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful.”

Anton LaVey (1930–1997) Founder of the Church of Satan, author of the Satanic Bible

“Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.'
'It's the most we can hope for.”

David Nicholls book One Day

“I'm like everyone else in this stupid, bloody, amazing world. I'm flawed. Impossibly so. But hopeful. I'm still me.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

“I don't understand this obsession with banging out records. What a stupid attitude! Like the world is holding its breath waiting for the next Cure album. It isn't.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

“If what you've done is stupid, but it works.. then it really isn't all that stupid.”

David Letterman (1947) American comedian and actor

“Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.”

Jim Butcher book Vignette

“I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much… so, so much.”

Jacqueline Woodson (1963) American writer

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch