loss of hope Quotes

“Of course, some of the girls are no longer children. Yet they are not allowed to be women. They are not married. There is no place for them in this way of life here. Except to do hard work or study scriptures. Their hopes and desires die on the vine. This turns them inward. They are seeking ways out of themselves. So they come to Tituba.”

“I see the damage and pain of hard years. I see the emptiness and desperation of existence without hope. I see a young life that has been too long.”

“And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”

“It was false hope, and I didn’t want any part of it.”

“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”