Life & Wisdom Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Hard work is inevitable; the only variable Bradley lets you choose is the story you tell yourself while doing it. The line opens with a blunt concession - "never been, and never will be" - that strips away the motivational-poster lie that effort becomes painless if you want it badly enough. That toughness matters: it earns the right to talk about hope without sounding naive.

The quote’s real move is its quiet heresy against outcome-worship. Bradley admits that hope and despair can arrive at "the same destination", which punctures the common self-help promise that optimism magically changes results. The subtext is almost clinical: what you can reliably shape is your experience of the journey. Hope is framed less as a belief in winning than as an aesthetic and psychological technology: it makes the road "more pleasant" even when it doesn’t make it shorter.

As a novelist best known for re-mythologizing power, gender, and faith in The Mists of Avalon era fantasy, Bradley is writing from a tradition that treats endurance as narrative, not just stamina. In fantasy, roads matter: quests are built out of setbacks, not endpoints. Her metaphor also nods to late-20th-century disillusionment - the sense that institutions fail and certainties fray - while refusing the fashionable pose of despair as sophistication.

There’s a moral challenge embedded here. If despair doesn’t grant you a better ending, it’s exposed as indulgence, even ego: a way to pre-suffer, to claim realism as armor. Bradley offers something sharper than cheer: choose hope because it improves the lived cost of being alive.