Quotes About Hope

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

At the Second Inaugural, Lincoln asked his countrymen "to strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." These same words nourished Franklin Roosevelt. He drew upon them, he said, because Abraham Lincoln had set goals for the future "in terms of which the human mind cannot improve.

There was a hush and everybody was holding their breath," Frances Perkins recalled. After what seemed a long-drawn moment of tension, he reached the rostrum, handed off his crutches, gripped the lectern edges with his powerful, viselike grip, tilted back his head, and "across his face there flashed a vast, world-encompassing smile.

Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne," writes George Valliant. "Humor can be marvelously therapeutic," adds another observer. "It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it—us?

For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.

Half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what?

Well, don't you think it's at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don't ever get over them?

We're back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world's crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance.

Listen Anna, if we don't believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there's no hope for us. We're going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.

I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun

We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn't know how to get it back.

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us.

Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.

Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.

I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be.

Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I'd make promises to God. If only He'd let me be a singer! I knew I'd probably turn to whiskey and rock 'n' roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His name and bought Mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.

The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing

Sex was dangerous, a trap, trashy as drinking whiskey in a paper cup or telling dirty stories in a loud whisper. Sex was a sure sign of having nothing better to hope for.

My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.