Quotes About Hope

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That's all you need.

by the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.

Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can't be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, "You wouldn't understand.

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

The people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at the most inappropriate times. Of course, their absence will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk.

This is all that restoration requires most of the time, that one person not give up.

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.

You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake's radiance, which would be my preference.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy.

Believing isn't the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.

When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can.

When you are on the knife's edge—when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse—you take in today.

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.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.

got dropped off at the airport in a better mood than I had arrived in. In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke. You discover that everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.

Is the soul damaged by acne, political madness, rigid or unloving parents? I think so, damaged but not mortally so. It becomes callused, barricaded, yet it's always there for the asking, always ready for hope. Some poet once wrote that we think we are drops in the ocean, but that we are really the ocean in drops, both minute and everything there is.

You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Grace means suddenly you're in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own.

In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes

In the face of everything, we slowly come through.