hope Quotes

“She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine, A noble lady in a humble home, And now her time for heavenly bliss has come, ’Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine. The soul that all its blessings must resign, And love whose light no more on earth finds room Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom, Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine; They weep within my heart; no ears they find Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care, And naught remains to me save mournful breath. Assuredly but dust and shade we are; Assuredly desire is mad and blind; Assuredly its hope but ends in death.”

“When once before I wished myself dead, the wish was not strong enough. I can make myself die only by convincing myself that there is also a hope I shall not succeed.”

“He’s right. It’s cruel to give hope where none should be. It only turns into disappointment, resentment, rage—all the things that make this life more difficult than it already is.”

“I am a good woman, I hope; and I know my duty.”

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

“Don’t say that. This torn-up piece of paper is the most hopeful thing I’ve ever seen. Do you know what this word is? [...] ‘Egress’ [...] ‘It means ‘the way out.’ It means ‘the exit.‘”

“Yes, I do; as long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.”

“For at my side walks hope. In the face of all that insists I turn back, I carry on: this, this is my compromise.”

“Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia.”

″‘Then be off home as quick as you can,’ said the Faun, ‘and – c-can you ever forgive me for what I meant to do?’ ‘Why, of course I can,’ said Lucy, shaking him heartily by the hand. ‘And I do hope you won’t get into dreadful trouble on my account.‘”

″‘Endure the hardships of your present state; Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.’ These words he spoke, but spoke not from his heart; His outward smiles conceal’d his inward smart.”

“They hope the fated land, but fear the fatal way.”

“I suspected that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings.”

“‘Hope,’ said Vikus. ‘There are times it will be very hard to find. Times when it will be much easier to choose hate instead. But if you want to find peace, you must first be able to hope it is possible.‘”

“There is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Every single circumstances of your life can change! ”

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”

“‘Celaena,’ Chaol said gently. And then she heard the scraping noise as his hand came into view, sliding across the flagstones. His fingertips stopped just at the edge of the white line. ‘Celaena,’ he breathed, his voice laced with pain—and hope. This was all she had left—his outstretched hand, and the promise of hope, of something better waiting on the other side of the line.”

“I could tell those were the squeaks and squawks of one door closing and another one opening.”

“Increasingly, I was recognizing the importance of hopefulness in creating justice.”

“But Walter’s case also taught me something else: there is light within this darkness.”

“For the first time in his life he got up every morning with something to look forward to. Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self – his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.”

“She sets down the bucket and undoes the latch. For a few seconds, all she does is breathe in the scent of the flowers, and then she turns to me and, without a word, kisses me. When she pulls away, she says, ‘No more winter at all. Finch, you brought me spring.’”

“Worthless. Stupid. These are the words I grew up hearing. They’re the words I try to outrun, because if I let them in, they might stay there and grow and fill me up and in, until the only thing left of me is worthless stupid worthless stupid worthless stupid freak. And then there’s nothing to do but run harder and fill myself with other words: This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.”

“Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow. Forever changed. I am forever changed.”

“He would like to show his drawings to his dad, but he didn’t dare. When he was in first grade, he had told his dad that he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He’d thought his dad would be pleased. He wasn’t.”

“This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was drowned.”

“Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.”

We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.

“We keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.”

“I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.”

“Hope - for such a simple word its meaning is profound.”

“From now on it was different; they seemed at the mercy of the sky’s caprices—in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally.”

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy.”

“The kind of hope I’m talking about is the belief that something good will come. That everything you’re going through and everything you’ve gone through will be worth the struggles and frustrations. The kind of hope I’m talking about is a deep belief that the world can be changed, that the impossible is possible.”

“There was an atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before.”

“My hope is that in these last moments he’ll show me the vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn’t happening, yet, and I’m a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke. There is a never a yes or no, what do you think, here, according to me, is the meaning of life.”

“My mother used to hope that I would rise up from my humble roots. Become someone sucessful, or even famous. I’m famous all right, but I don’t think it’s what she had in mind.”

“Walsh hugs me, taking me by surprise. ‘I don’t know how,’ she mutters, ‘but I hope you become queen one day. Imagine what you could do then? The Red queen.‘”

“I sat on the narrow bed and took the Sarah file out of my bag. Sarah was the only person I could bear thinking about right now. Finding her felt like a sacred mission, felt like the only possible way to keep my head up, to dispel the sadness in which my life had become immersed.”

“I’ll find a way to go back and save him, I’ll find a way.”

“From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting.”

“When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”

“No minister can save anyone. He can only offer himself as a guide to fearful people. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely in this guidance that the first signs of hope become visible.”

“Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find when they join a mass movement, namely, change and a chance for a new beginning.”

″‘Hope,’ he says, ‘cherishes the soul of him who lives in justice and holiness, and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his journey;—hope which is mightiest to sway the restless soul of man.‘”

“Silence hangs over us, but ... a different kind of silence, one that lets me breathe. ”

“Why don’t people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don’t look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don’t need to be rewarded in this life.”

“You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”

“I prayed that we would not be in an accident (I was terrified of cars and buses) and that we would get there by my mother’s birthday – seven days away – and that we would bring her home.”

“Ensnared In nooses of a hundred idle hopes, Slaves to their passion and their wrath, they buy Wealth with base deeds, to glut hot appetites.”

″‘It’s not about the money. It’s about what I could do with it.‘”

“How far would you go to keep the hope of love alive?”

“Oh, how long Me seems it, ere the promis’d help arrive!”

“Even though it was initially marketed as a new kind of massively multiplayer online game, the OASIS quickly evolved into a new way of life.”

“I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength here.”

“It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell someone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.”

″‘Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.‘”

“Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better.”

“My mother believed you could be anything you wanted in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.”

“The Nazis couldn’t stop the wind and the snow. The Russians couldn’t take the sun or the stars.”

“A more realistic approach would be to accept that a significant trauma often leaves a survivor forever changed, and although there should always be hope, the notion that things will go back to ‘normal’ is misleading.”

“I practically ran forward and snatched the letter out of her hand. I was so hungry for words from my family.”

“For the rest of that day, whenever he looked at the things about him, and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope; but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope.”

“I don’t think it was a lie, Maxwell, do you? I think he needed something to hope for and so he invented this rather remarkable fantasy you describe. Everybody needs something to hope for. Don’t call it a lie. Kevin wasn’t a liar.”

“I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”

“False hope buys us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem and our greatest opportunity.”

“I’m afraid to hope but I can’t help it, and the idea of hoping in this most hopeless of all places makes me want to cry.”

“She was gone, definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his heart that some day she would need him and send for him.”

“But even the worst decisions we make don’t necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity.”

“We are not prepared to go where we need to go. So we do not clearly see the need to end something, or we maintain false hope, or we just are not able to do it. As a result, we stay stuck in what should now be in our past.”

“In that one there is hope,” I heard my uncle Juan say to mother. I knew he talked about me. ”

“No I have not asked Jesus to join us. All I hope and long for now is that He will ask me to join Him.”

“You’ve been fighting since you were born . . . You fought off that brain surgery. You fought off those seizures . . . You kept your hope. And now, you have to take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope.”

“I know what you’re trying to do, but it doesn’t matter to me one bit, because I’m not giving up on him until there isn’t an ounce of hope left.”

“A man must know how to look before he can hope to see.”

“But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head. I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will. The last cowboy, Robert.”

“He made plans to keep himself sane, built castles of hope in the dark.”

“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”

“True faith means holding nothing back. It means putting every hope in God’s fidelity to His Promises.”

“After the first few weeks of building up intense hope about the dog, it had slowly dawned on him that intense hope was not the answer and never had been. In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.”

″Dear Catherine, I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other. Everything I put on you. Everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I’ll always love you ‘cause we grew up together and you helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me always, and I’m grateful for that. Whatever someone you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end. Love, Theodore.”

“Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.”

“I don’t know. I have a lot of dreams about my ex-wife, Catherine, where we’re friends like we used to be. We’re not gonna be together, we’re not together, but we’re friends still. She’s not angry.”

“Good. Tonight, after you were gone, I thought a lot. About you and how you’ve been treating me and I thought, “Why do I love you?” And then, I felt everything in me just let go of everything I was holding onto so tightly. And it hit me that I don’t have an intellectual reason. I don’t need one. I trust myself, I trust my feelings. I’m not gonna try to be anything other than who I am anymore and I hope you can accept that.”

“Faith is the substance of whatever it is that we hope for. The important thing is that we teach that faith is connected to good works and responsibility.”

“But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness. So, at least, we must believe if we are to live in the world of today.”

“The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration.”

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

“The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wanted it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water-that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.”

“In a world where you can’t open your eyes, isn’t a blindfold all you could ever hope for?”

“If I wanted to make a difference… Wishing for things to change wouldn’t make them change. Hoping for improvements wouldn’t bring them. Dreaming wouldn’t provide all the answers I needed. Vision wouldn’t be enough to bring transformation to me or others.”

“I am hope.”

“Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.”

“The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home . . . But they wouldn’t let him go home.”

““We don’t have to beg or bribe God to give us strength or hope or patience. We need only turn to Him, admit that we can’t do this on our own, and understand that bravely bearing up under long-term illness is one of the most human, and one of the most godly, things we can ever do.”

“There are a great many things that I wish to do, and don’t get to.”

“The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”

“We need hope as much as we need bread and...”

“He didn’t laugh as easily as he once had. But when he did, some of that grim coolness lifted from him and he seemed a bit more like the Mal I used to know. It gave me hope that he might not be lost forever.”

“They really screwed me up.”

“Can you imagine how far they have come?”

“I’ve spent my life searching for a way to make things right. You’re the first glimmer of hope I’ve had in a long time.”

“Thank you for returning to your country.”

“Nothing created is of any ultimate use without hope. To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.”

“Without hope, our faith gives us only an acquaintance with God. Without love and hope, faith only knows Him as a stranger.”

“Hope is the gateway to contemplation, because contemplation is an experience of divine things and we cannot experience what we do not in some way possess.”

“By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence.”

″ But in this enlightened age to hope to dupe the people by the arts they are practicing is still more extraordinary.”

“It is my pleasure to introduce your new police commissioner. I do not envy her the next few years. The job has few rewards. The best you can hope for is that when you’re finished with it, things aren’t as lousy as they would’ve been without you. Ellen Yindel is eminently qualified for this job...She face a city of thieves and murderers and honest people too frightened to hope. She faces life-and-death decisions, every hour to come. Some will torture her. She will face a man who is the living spoirit of...something we need. She may be his enemy. She may learn from him.”

“You love this earnest dog, but also you admire the raccoon and Lord help you in your place of hope and improbables.”

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

“I am a lover of love and I am a lover of words, and the two together spin visions of airy castles, but also may pierce the heart of hope. And so I remind you that I am a fool, a poet, and what matters is reality, not lovely words. Words are full of promise, yet empty of matter.”

“I remained on the ladder, looking at the figurine in my hand. You’re wrong, Aunt Josie, I thought. It’s not pride I’m feeling. It’s another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent, and hot. This one sits inside you quietly and eats you from the inside out like the trichina worms the pigs get. It’s the Eighth Deadly Sin. The one God left out. Hope.”

“In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good...”

“I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”

“Fortunately, in God’s economy, getting to the end of ourselves is the beginning of hope. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit” (Matthew 5:3)—meaning that when we realize we have no more resources, we’re ready to ask God for help.”

“My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know—he will know and through him we will know.”

“Sometimes you aim for the sun and fall short. But if you keep fighting for your dream, it becomes something so much better than you even knew to hope for. ”

“I’ve excluded happiness as one of those possibilities we seek for ourselves. Oh, I still want it, but that’s beside the point. Contentment - they say it’s the ultimate, but I can’t even wish for that. I don’t even want the desire to be content. I can only hope for silence.”

“WITH GORILLA GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR MAN?”

“Say it, reader. Say the word ‘quest’ out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn’t it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.”

“It is he who heals the broken in spirit and binds up their wounds, he who numbers the stars one by one...”

“You will, little one. You saved her life, after all. Someday you will find her again. Someday the war will end. All wars do.”

“All his thoughts, all his dreams were centered on the miraculous, endless possibilities opened up by a real, live, miniature Indian of his very own. It would be too terrible if the whole thing turned out to be some sort of mistake.”

“I will be brave. I am the only one who knows about the ovens, but I will be brave. I will not take away their hope, which is all they have. I will not tell them that the Nazis often lied and said people were going to take showers when they took them to be killed.”

“Without laughter there is no hope. Without hope there is no life.”

“Live,” he whispered. “For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.”

“Six million,” Hannah said, “but that’s not all the Jews there are. In the end, in the future, there will be Jews still. And there will be Israel, a Jewish state, where there will be a Jewish president and a Jewish senate. And in America, Jewish movie stars.”

Instead of being stories of hope for children, I suspect their massive appeal lies in the fact they are really wildly-nostalgic stories for adults about how broken childhoods (and sometimes even broken adulthoods) should have been.

Glenda writes with such gentleness, with intricate attention to the things that really matter, and captures wisps of beauty from the world and its inhabitants, weaves them into a warm tapestry and lays this on the page with such a feather touch. When I first read this book, I just sobbed and sobbed. The sadness is as beautiful as the happiness and hope.

“But far away in Africa, where the monkeys chattered in the palm-trees before they went to bed under the big yellow moon, they would say to one another, ‘I wonder what The Good Man’s doing now-over there, in the Land of White Men! Do you think he will ever come back?’ And Polynesia would squeak out from the vines, ‘I think he will- I guess he will- I hope he will!‘”

“Rebecca’s eyes were like faith,—“the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

“Beegu would always remember those small ones. She hoped they would remember her too.”

“Beegu told her parents all about life on Earth. How Earth creatures were mostly big and unfriendly, but there were some small ones who seemed hopeful.”

This story is set in the heart of the Great Depression. It chronicles Oklahoma’s staggering dust storms, and the environmental--and emotional--turmoil they leave in their path. An unforgettable tribute to hope and inner strength.

“When you go owling you don’t need words or warm or anything but hope.”

“Yet self-acceptance and positive self-talk help them build emotional resilience, growth mindset, and well-being.”

“I hope you sit on a tack, I said to Paul. I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone part and lands in Australia.”

“Esperanza thought about the class play later that afternoon and wondered what it would be like in the spotlight. ‘To put my heart into everything I do,’ she answered.”

“But when the school play doesn’t go the way she’d hoped, will she remember to show it to herself?”

“In desperation Bruce scrunched himself up into a ball, hoping the witch would mistake him for part of the rock. But there was no chance of fooling old Roxy, and holding her lantern out over the creek she spotted the bear in a flash.”

“Still methinks there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me, for I will kiss her.”

“And every year, folk come from all over Cornwall at Christmas time, to see Mousehole lit up with a thousand lights, shining their message of hope and a safe haven to all those who pass in peril of the sea.”

“Leonzio also hopes to find his son Tonio, kidnapped by hunters a few years earlier.”

“What are you saying?” He fought to keep his voice under control. “You love me but there’s no hope for us?”

“ ‘Morris,’ said Victor, ‘I hope you remember where you put the bag.’ But Morris was already fast asleep.”

“From where she was across-river, she could look away to these hills. She might even be able to see M.C.‘s needle of a pole. No, not likely. But maybe a sparkle, maybe a piercing flash in the corner of her eye. She would have to smile and come on home. Jones sighed contentedly.”

“Because-they are saying, ‘one of the great art recoveries of history.’ And this is the part I hoped would please you- maybe not who knows, but I hoped. Museum masterworks, returned to public ownership! Stewardship of cultural treasure! Great joy! All the angels are singing! but it would never have happened, if not for you.”

″‘O, unhappy people!’ she cried. ‘Tomorrow will bring sorrow, but the day after will bring laughter! Prepare to mingle your colours!‘”

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the colored America is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the colored American is still sadly crippled by the manacle of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”

“How strange that instead of taking his heart, I’m hoping he takes mine.”

“Doubt steals hope. And with no hope, everything that matters doesn’t feel as important anymore.”

“Hope in the shadow of fear is the world’s most powerful motivator.”

“I only hope she knows what she’s doing. Climbing so high, so quickly: it only makes for further to fall.”

″‘Are the Oompa Loompas really joking, Grandpa?’ asked Charlie. ‘Of course they’re joking,’ answered Grandpa Joe. ‘They must be joking. At least I hope they’re joking. Don’t you?‘”

“It is easy in a moment like this to want to speak over this woman, to tell Tia there is nothing more we can do, to say out loud the woman is lucky that her lungs still draw breath. But I learned young, you do not speak of the dying as if they are already dead.”

“Finally, my hope, because here is the part of your dating life where you no longer date to find someone to fill the emptiness. You look for someone to share the fullness that you both already are.”

“You never know what is waiting for you on the other side of your hope.”

“After an eternity of tortured lives, the human fields tasted something that could almost be described as hope.”

“Hope is the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to that melody right now.”

“Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”

“Fear is terrible, but the combination of hope and fear is worse.”

Hopeful of a less brutal life, he escapes to Sydney - only to be further disillusioned.

Two years after the Last Days, Australia has become a dangerous place, and a battle-ground for survival.

“Jeffy, I hope I never have to hear another gun go off, as long as I live.”

″‘You came to find me?’ said the Black Knight. ‘You are here on my account? Thank the Lord! Then perhaps it is not too late...‘”

“His father hoped everything, and forced him to live in his books; and, when the child had reached the age of ten, saw the end of his hopes.”

″‘I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider’s web. I saved the victim’s life.’ ‘The firefly’s?’ said the minstrel. ‘The spider’s. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.‘”

“Mathilda’s unwavering quest for color in a black-and-white world inspires the hope that anything is possible.”

“It is hard to explain the savagery of hope.”

″‘Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world,’ said Old Parson. ‘You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.‘”

“I’m on deck the dawn we sail into New York. I’m sure I’m in a film, that it will end and lights will come up in the Lyric Cinema... Rich Americans in top hats white ties and tails must be going home to bed with the gorgeous women with white teeth. The rest are going to work in warm comfortable offices and no one has a care in the world.”

“The little wooden horse knew that he was not so handsome now as in those days. The paint had worn off his red saddle; his blue stripes were scratched and bare; his four green wheels had travelled so far they were nearly worn out; but he hoped that the little girl would not notice these things.”

“I think she hoped her voice would somehow keep him alive.”

“Oh, Nancy, what are you going to do next? We’ve known you only twenty-four hours and you’ve already boosted our morale sky-high.”

“For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”

″ ‘I know a number of funy things,’ says th lady. ‘I have been at some people’s christenings, and turned away from other folks’ doors. I have seen some people spoilt by good fortune, and others, as I hope, improved by hardship. I advise you to stay at the town where the coach stops for the night. Stay there and study, and remember your old friend to whom you were kind.′ ”

“It was like coming home after you’d been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.”

“Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.”

“All these maybes swimming around my head make me think that “maybe” could just be another word for hope.”

“Must we turn to the anthropic principle for an explanation? Was it all just a lucky chance? That would seem a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe.”

“...he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....”

“Instead of being delighted as her husband had hoped, she tossed the invitation peevishly onto the table and muttered: ‘What earthly use is that to me?‘”

“I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it.”

“Here’s another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you’re dead.”

“There is a queen in the north, and she has already beaten you once. She will beat you again. And again. Because what she represents, and what your son represents, is what you fear most: hope. You cannot steal it, no matter how many you rip from their homes and enslave. And you cannot break it, no matter how many you murder.”

“This gave him peace and hope, that anything he’d missed out on when he married Rachel so young was still there, waiting. That other people had screwed up and were starting over, too.”

“We stay precisely as alive and precisely as human as we were the day we were born. The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.”

“The theme is connection. We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.”

“Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.”

″...change is the nature of life. The reason to hope.”

“But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.”

“Hope is not a strategy”

“It’s always easier once you get to the destination to forget about the hills and winding roads you had to take to get there, but I knew that there was a lot of doubt and desire and hope all mixed together on the way.”