Quotes About Hope

You may grind their souls in the self-same mill, You may bind them, heart and brow; But the poet will follow the rainbow still, And his brother will follow the plow. JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY (1844–90) 'The Rainbow's Treasure

Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. Don't misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible readership.

Richard E Simmons III

the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria—at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.

It is often in the darkest skies that we see the brightest stars.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called "resources." People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly.… Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this "commonsense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo café. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet.

Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.

They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.

People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites. For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.

Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

He read and reread 'Ulysses'. The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.

And there is no nicer time on earth than now—everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential—the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.

I'm not a great hoper, Wade, I guess. We're not walking fast. Others pass us. I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.

We don't know where any of this is going, do we?" she said, and she squeezed my hand tight again. "No," I said. And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life. (Sweethearts, 1986)

People are unrealistically optimistic even when the stakes are high. About 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard. But around the time of the ceremony, almost all couples believe that there is approximately a zero percent chance that their marriage will end in divorce—even those who have already been divorced!10 (Second marriage, Samuel Johnson once quipped, "is the triumph of hope over experience.")

pushed by pain or pulled by possibility.

Reflection opens up hope.