Books to give you hope: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

En estas horas lentas y vacías, me sube del alma a la mente una tristeza de todo el ser, la amargura de ser al mismo tiempo una sensación mía y una cosa exterior, que no está en mi poder alterar.

and then dreaming over the result.

‘If you can identify with characters trapped in their circumstances, and share their disappointments as well as their unsteady steps towards liberation, you may find optimism in your own situation’ (Wyke 2004: 12).

If I often interrupt a thought with a scenic description that in some way fits into the real or imagined scheme of my impressions, it’s because the scenery is a door through which I flee from my awareness of my creative impotence. In the middle of the conversations with myself that form the words of this book, I’ll feel the sudden need to talk to s

Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.