“Hope is cruel and has no consequence”

“Yet experience has taught me that fate is sometimes cruel and that even a boatload of hope is sometimes not enough.”

“Folly is often more cruel in the consequence, than malice can be in the intent.”

“Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.”

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

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

“I hate you! (Artemis)
Don’t keep saying that, Artie. It’s cruel to get my hopes up. (Acheron)”

“For a moment hope, bright and cruel as a knife, presented itself to me. It took every ounce of strength I had to turn away.”

“But preference, and its consequence, neglect, is the child's most cruel wrong. The bitter feeling of comparing our own lot with another's, will come quite soon enough without its being taught in infancy.”

“Two world wars have destroyed in a few years the material and spiritual capital accumulated by centuries of work. The nineteenth century had hoped to turn man, by virtue of education, into a reasoning being: a half-century of ferocity has proved that a cruel, primitive beast still resides in him.”