Life & Wisdom Quote by Lloyd Alexander

"There's this huge number of desperate people" lands with the plainspoken force of someone who has spent a career making big moral weather readable at human scale. Lloyd Alexander isn’t performing desperation as a melodramatic flourish; he’s naming it as a demographic fact, the kind of background condition that quietly governs how societies behave. The phrasing matters: "there's this" sounds almost offhand, like a reluctant admission, while "huge number" widens the lens from individual tragedy to systemic pressure. Desperation becomes not an exception but a crowd.

Alexander’s fiction often takes seriously the idea that ordinary people are pushed into extraordinary choices by hunger, fear, and the longing to matter. In that light, the line carries a double edge. On the surface, it can read as compassion: a recognition that suffering isn’t rare, and that moral judgment without context is cheap. Underneath, it’s also a warning about what desperation does to the social contract. Desperate people are easy to recruit, easy to exploit, easy to radicalize; they will trade tomorrow for today because tomorrow has stopped feeling real.

The intent feels less like a slogan than an author’s diagnostic. It asks the reader to see mass desperation as the true antagonist: not a single villain, not a single bad decision, but an environment that turns choices into traps. The quietest part of the sentence is the most damning: this isn’t new, and it isn’t going away on its own.