Quotes About Hope

Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky.

do you still believe that I am the Resurrection and the Life? Even when you don't get what you want? Even when nothing makes sense?

it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I

I hoped her life would turn topsy-turvy enough to get her attention. Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God—the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

To be engrossed by something outside the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass--seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this.

grace is a small white butterfly, and life is a semi trailer careening up 101.

we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.

We are going to save the world by repeatedly busting the dread that looms over us like a blimp, by pushing back our sleeves and distracting it with the next right thing and good works.

Love and goodness and the world's beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

wish there'd been a shortcut, but the wound

It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born." That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue.

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. The sky had shifted

Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.

I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.

hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

Langston Hughes: Gather out of star-dust Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, Storm-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust Not for sale.

You stop pretending life is such fin or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people.

we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you'll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you'll see at least one next right step you can take.

Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.

Her message was always the same: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God.

hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. So