The darkest hour has only sixty minutes.

Mandel’s aphorism reframes despair as something bounded and therefore survivable. By translating “the darkest hour” into a literal unit of time—sixty minutes—it punctures the feeling that suffering is endless and restores a sense of proportion. The line also implies that emotional “night” is cyclical: even when one reaches a nadir, time continues to move, and conditions can change. Its effectiveness comes from mixing cliché (“darkest hour”) with a concrete, almost wry correction, turning a vague metaphor into a practical reminder: endure the present moment, because it cannot last forever in the same intensity.