Quotes About Hope

Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won't leave until led out by marshals.

There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie.

Brother Mingo made some good points, Lander said. We can't save everyone. But that doesn't mean we can't try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing's going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.

I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, 'This is not enough.' But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don't.

An optimist is a braver cynic.

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn't think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go. Even dead, he'd still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.

There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.

Gloria laughed at them and said that she'd overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.

We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.

He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound.

He was there, he said, to raise just a single hat, but eventually that hat would raise the heavens. He would go forth as a slave no more.

That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.

He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place. and he was in the habit of hoping for it.

The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies.

So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself. In

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves.

Rami said to the audience that all walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naïve, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls. Still, it was his job to insert a crack in the one most visible to him.