Patients who suffer from cancer or AIDS or another deadly disease may lose faith in their recovery and thus quickly fail. You can see that surrender in the eyes of people wrapped in greasy blankets on our streets; you can see it in the eyes of children bruised by hands or hunger or neglect. And even in circumstances much less dire, anyone who outlives childhood must pass through spells when the inward singing stops. No understanding of hope can be honest unless it reckons with the absence of hope, the dark night of the soul when nothing comforts and nothing reassures. . . . If hope is a bright, indomitable bird, despair is the dark ocean over which it flies, against which it sings.
— Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting for Hope