Hope is for the living….pptx
Miriam Akhtar (psychologist)
Hope, on the other hand, is a practical concept in positive psychology. It is made up of two components – motivation or agency (willpower) and finding pathways to the goal (waypower). Or to put it another way: where there is a will to transcend tragedy there is almost certainly a way.
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Yaakov Barzilai ‘The Neighbor from Bergen Belsen’
The strangle-hold around the Jews was growing tighter from day to day. Anti-Semitic laws were issuing from the legislature in the Hungarian capital like fresh loaves from the local bakery. Jewish households were filled with anxiety, blended with hope that these laws might yet prove a temporary phenomenon and soon disappear. The market in delusions was booming.
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Dad bore his suffering heroically, but his lean body withered from day to day. Mum was stubborn in her refusal to compromise with reality, and when the envoys of the sub-conscious came to prepare her for the future, she brushed them aside. With her big body she protected the springs of hope and prevented any attempt to dry them up. Time after time she wrestled with the angel of death who swooped like a ravenous eagle pouncing on his prey.
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Jon Bloom
The more hopeful we are, the more mentally healthy we are.
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William Brodrick ‘The Sixth Lamentation’
My mother never mentioned her own loss. Ever since, Hope, for me, has not been about anticipation…but endurance. Like the food taken at Passover, from a very early age I was introduced to the bitter and the sweet.
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For within her the heavens were lit by repeated explosions of fireworks, with every shade of blue and green and yellow and red, splintering into trillions of gleaming particles against a vast stream of silver, dancing stars. They fell as a shower upon her raised head, on to her lashes, balancing precariously on each curved, counted hair before tumbling joyously over into the abyss beneath, where she would soon follow after the reunion with Robert that would surely come. She had entered upon a timeless, enduring, secret benediction.
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Charlotte Bronte ‘Villette’
I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.
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Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.
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The cool peace and dewy sweetness of the night filled me with a mood of hope: not hope on any definite point, but a general sense of encouragement and heart-ease.
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Brenè Brown ‘The Gifts of Imperfection’
HOPE is not an emotion. It’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process.
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Hope is a thought process made up of a trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency. (C. R. Snyder)
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Hope is a combination of setting goals, having the tenacity and perseverance to pursue them, and believing in our own abilities.
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Hope is learned.
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Brene Brown ‘Atlas of the Heart’
We need hope like we need air. To live without hope is to risk suffocating on hopelessness and despair, risk being crushed by the belief that there is no way out of what is holding us back, no way to get to what we desperately need.
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Hope is a function of struggle – we develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort. Hope is forged when our goals, pathways, and agency are tested and when change is actually possible.
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Nick Cave & Sean O’Hagan ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’
The rational aspect of our selves is a beautiful and necessary thing, of course, but often its inflexible nature can render these small gestures of hope merely fanciful. It closes down the deeply healing aspect of divine possibility.
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Hope is optimism with a broken heart.
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Janet Skeslien Charles ‘The Paris Library’
“We’re Here.” She needed to convince them that the ALP must remain open. “Libraries are lungs,” she scrawled, her pen barely able to keep up with her idea. “Books the fresh air breathed in to keep the heart beating, to keep the brain imagining, to keep hope alive. Subscribers depend on us for news, for community. Soldiers need books, need to know their friends at the Library care. Our work is too important to stop now.”
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‘For so long, I hoped he’d be released,’ Maman said, ‘that he’d make his way back to us.’
It had hurt to hope, but now I knew it was more painful to give up hope.
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G. K. Chesterton
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all… As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be strength.
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G. K. Chesterton ‘Heretics’
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
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Tracy Chevalier ‘A Single Thread’
“Dum spiro spero” – While I breathe, I hope. Always.
Sir Winston Churchill
All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour; duty; mercy; hope.
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Charles Colson ‘My Final Word’
The virtue of hope is neat: Everybody needs hope in their lives. If their circumstances are tough, they have to hope they’re going to get better. Hope is that which you seek, and the belief that what you seek can be realised.
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Show me somebody who can live without hope, and I’ll show you a suicide waiting to happen.
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John Cook ‘The Last Lighthouse Keeper’
There was no grieving while hope prevailed. Or uncertainty.
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Hope is all very well, but it hurts when it bursts.
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Simone De Beauvoir ‘A Very Easy Death’
Hope was her most urgent need.
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Annie Dillard ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumours of death, beauty, violence… I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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Anthony Doerr ‘About Grace’
Hope was a sunrise, a friend in an alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.
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Hope is something that can be dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible even.
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Dr Edith Eger ‘The Choice’
The words I heard inside my head made a tremendous difference in my ability to maintain hope. We were able to discover an inner strength we could draw on – a way to talk to ourselves that helped us feel free inside, that kept us grounded in our own morality, that gave us foundation and assurance even when the external forces sought to control and obliterate us. “I’m good! I’m innocent! Somehow, something good will come of this.”
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Dr Edith Eger ‘The Gift’
Freedom is a lifetime practice. Freedom requires hope, which I define in two ways: the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next. Hope allows us to live in the present instead of the past, and to unlock the doors of our mental prisons.
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Hope really is a matter of life and death. I knew a young woman n Auschwitz who became certain that the camp would be liberated by Christmas. She’d seen the new arrivals dwindle, heard rumours that the Germans were facing major military losses, and convinced herself that it was only a matter of weeks before we’d be free. But then Christmas came and went. No one arrived to liberate the camp. The day after Christmas my friend was dead. Hope had kept her going. When her hope died, she did, too.
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Then I heard an inner voice: “You did it in Auschwitz. You can do it again now.” I had a choice. I could give in and give up. Or I could choose hope.
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Hope isn’t the white paint we use to mask our suffering. It’s an investment in curiosity. A recognition that if we give up now, we’ll never get to see what happens next.
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To choose hope is to choose life.
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Hope does not guarantee anything about what will happen in the future. (The scoliosis I’ve had since the war has stayed with me.)
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Choosing hope affects what gets my attention every day.
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Hope is curiosity writ large. A willingness to cultivate within yourself whatever kindles light, and to shine that light into the darkest places.
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Hope is a bold act of imagination.
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Ignorance is the enemy of hope. And it’s the catalyst for hope.
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Hope doesn’t obscure or whitewash reality. Hope tells us that life is full of darkness and suffering – and yet if we survive today, tomorrow we’ll be free.
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Albert Einstein
Learn from yesterday; live for today; hope for tomorrow.
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Zack Eswine ‘Spurgeon’s Sorrows’
When realistic hope quits so do we.
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Quote: Realistic hope is ‘the door out of the blackness of depression and despair.’ (Dr Richard Winter)
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Promise fuels realistic hope.
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Hope demolished can become hope rebuilt.
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Richard Paul Evans ‘Finding Noel’
I’ve come to know that our families are a canvas on which we paint our greatest hopes – imperfect and sloppy, for we are all amateurs at life, but if we do not focus too much on our mistakes, a miraculous picture emerges. And we learn that it is not the beauty of the image that warrants our gratitude – it’s the chance to paint.
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Richard Paul Evans ‘Timepiece’
Hope is a rare gift that, if we are lucky, comes to us with the power to heal our lives. I’ve come to know that the deepest sense of hope often springs from the hardest lessons in life. It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen– perhaps it is divine irony that within the darkest moments we are capable of revealing the greatest light, demonstrating what is best with humanity.
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Richard Paul Evans ‘The Letter’
The answers are not in the past. Healing comes from purpose and purpose resides in our hope of the future.
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Richard Paul Evans ‘The Locket – Esther Huish’s Diary’
That which we spend our lives hoping for is often no more than another chance to do what we should have done to begin with.
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Richard Paul Evans ‘The Carousel’
In the face of the lies told by depression, we must have courage to survive. And courage is best fed by hope. The sun will rise again. The only uncertainty is whether or not we will be there to greet it.
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Richard Paul Evans ‘The Sunflower’
Hope grabs on to whatever floats.
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Michael Faber ‘The Book of Strange New Things’
Hope is a fragile thing, as fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can’t believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say: See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilisations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible.
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Francoise Frenkel ‘A Bookshop in Berlin’
Jews from all the occupied countries wandered around, disorientated, purposeless, and without hope, in an ever-increasing state of anxiety and agitation.
It was the lack of anything to do that weighed most heavily, draining every ounce of energy, any resistance.
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We tried to focus on our plight. But all we could say to each other was so pointless and gloomy that we ended up silent.
I tried to put my thoughts in some sort of order and to think what last-ditch attempt might save me. The future appeared to offer little hope.
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Frederic Gros ‘A Philosophy of Walking’
Hopefulness, basically, is a matter of belief than knowledge. To believe, to hope, to dream, beyond any achievement, any lesson, any past.
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Internal transformation remains the pilgrim’s mystical ideal: he hopes to be absolutely altered on his return.
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Matt Haig ‘The Comfort Book‘
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
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Time means change. And change is the nature of life. The reason to hope.
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Hope is a beautiful thing to find in art or stories or music.
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Hope is the thing we most want to cling on to in periods of despair or worry.
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Hope is available for all. You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope; you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.
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I clutched on to hope like a security blanket.
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It is hard to cultivate hope when in a state of despair.
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Hope can feel in scarce supply for everyone these days. Global pandemics, brutal injustices, political turmoil and glaring inequalities can all take their toll on your reserves. And yet, the thing with hope is that it is persistent. It has the potential to exist in the most troubled times.
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Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be hopeful.
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Hope is the acceptance of possibility (of a better future)
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When things go dark, we can’t see what we have. All we need is to light a candle, or ignite some hope, and we can see that what we thought was lost was merely hidden.
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I can remember one night in the middle of a depression feeling suicidal and looking up at a cloudless sky of infinite stars. I felt a mental pain so deep it was physical. But seeing the sky, our small glimpse of the universe, flooded me with hope and wonder of life, and the world is full of such moments.
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A more enduring and resilient kind of hope: A hope that doesn’t wish for bad not to happen – because they sometimes do – but rather one that enables us to see that bad things are never the whole story. They are as filled with uncertain outcomes as everything else.
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We can exist in hope, in the infinite, in the unanswered and open question of life itself.
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Hope is born from the uncertain fabric of life.
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It took Matt Haig more than a decade to be able to talk openly, properly, to everyone, about his experience. He soon discovered that act of talking is in itself a therapy. Where talk exists, so does hope.
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Peter Heller ‘The Painter’
The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and love, and all the things they don’t know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas.
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Robert Hillman ‘The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted’
Happiness ran in her arteries and veins and reached every part of her body and being.
Do you see how things turn out? Do you see that the world is big enough to make certain things possible? That thirty-six years ago the German Student Union could hold a rally in Opernplatz, Berlin, and burn twenty-five thousand books, many written by Jews, the students rejoicing in their festival of loathing, and now this, in Hometown. Hannah’s bookshop of the broken hearted, a thing of beauty.
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Kay Redfield Jamison ‘Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide’
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralysed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain.
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Rachel Joyce ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’
If we can’t be open, if we can’t accept what we don’t know, there really is no hope.
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David Kessler ‘Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief’
The grieving mind finds no hope after loss. But when you are ready to hope again, you will be able to find it. Bad days don’t have to be your eternal destiny. That doesn’t mean your grief will get smaller over time. It means that you must get bigger.
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Hope can be like oxygen to people in grief. For others, however, especially in the early stages, it can feel invalidating.
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Death ends a life, but not our relationship, our love, or our hope.
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Finding a sense of hope about the future is important in grief because people continually replaying negative memories signifies that they are stuck in the past.
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Dr Martin Luther King Jr
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
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Dr Louis E. Lagrand ‘Healing Grief, Finding Peace’
Hope comes from the simple gift of human presence.
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Anne Lamott
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.
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Anne Lamott ‘Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
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.
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Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.
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Some days there seems to be little reason for hope, in our families, cities, and world.
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In times of rational and primitive fear, hope has to do push-ups out in the parking lot to stay pumped – and it does.
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Hope changes as you get older, from the hope that this or that happens, to hope in life, old friends, laughter, art, goodness, helpers. I hope and am amazed, some early mornings, at just finding myself alive.
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Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.
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We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.
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Christy Lefteri ‘The Beekeeper of Aleppo’
Mustafa has sent me another message. He is waiting for me in the north of England in Yorkshire. I remember how his words kept me moving. ‘Where there are bees there are flowers, and where there are flowers there is new life and hope.’
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The picture she had drawn was so different from her usual artwork – a flower-filled field overlooked by a single tree.
‘But how did you draw this? I said.
‘I can feel the pencil marks on the paper.’
I looked at the picture again. The colours were wild- the tree blue, the sky red. The lines were broken, leaves and flowers out of place, and yet it held a beauty that was mesmerising and indescribable, like an image in a dream, like a picture of a world that is beyond our imagination.
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‘Please,’ she says, ‘don’t lose hope. That’s the thing.’ There is a tone of resignation in her voice and she is pulling at the strand of hair. ‘This is what I always tell people, you see. Never, never, never lose HOPE.
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But it is Afra’s face that brings me to life, standing there in this tiny garden like she stood in Mustafa’s courtyard in Aleppo, her eyes so full of sadness and hope, so full of darkness and light.
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C. S. Lewis
Hope is the only thing that will keep you from despair.
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Gordon Livingston ‘Only Spring: on mourning the death of my son’
As I try to face my own grief and confusion, I wonder about everything I have done and been. I struggle to make sense out of what has happened, but this feels like yet another futile exercise, of no real importance to anyone, and in the end, a wasted attempt to understand the unknowable…. For the sake of those who still love and depend on me, I must have hope.
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Quote: “The kind of hope I often think about (especially in hopeless situations) is, I believe, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t. Hope is not prognostication – it’s an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism.
It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.” (Vaclav Havel ‘Disturbing the Peace)
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Gordon Livingston ‘Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart’
It is the job of the psychotherapist to re-instil hope. I frequently ask patients, “What are you looking forward to? People who are overwhelmed by anxiety or depression often have no answer.
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Encouraging people to change is an exercise in shared hope.
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This is what passes for hope: those we have lost evoked in us feelings of love that we didn’t know we were capable of. These permanent changes are their legacies, their gifts to us. It is our task to transfer that love to those who still need us. In this way we remain faithful to their memories.
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The primary goal of parenting, beyond keeping our children safe and loved, is to convey to them a sense that it is possible to be happy in an uncertain world, to give them hope… If we can demonstrate in our own lives qualities of commitment, determination, and optimism, then we have done our job.
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Max Lucado ‘The Candle of Hope’
As long as we can keep that candle of hope lit, as long as we can keep that spark of possibility afire, then we can stay strong.
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William McInnes ‘Christmas Tales’
I copied out a passage from her book. The one about Anne Frank hearing the sound of thunder, a thunder that will engulf her and, she supposed, all who lived. How in that moment of understanding her own mortality, she could feel the suffering of so many. And yet at the same time when she looked up at the sky, a limitless sky, she found not fear but hope. Hope for change, peace and love…
‘That is a very good human being at work, right there,’ I wrote, and I added, ‘I have to look up at the sky a bit more.’
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Fiona McIntosh ‘The Pearl Thief’
I’d become cynical and I feared I was fast becoming resigned to hearing the knock at the door and seeing German police with their hated swastika badges arriving for us. Imprisonment, being worked to death in some place like Terezin, felt inevitable. Dare I admit that death sounded not exactly welcome but perhaps the best outcome? My life until 1939 had been full of possibility and promise; now it felt like my world had reduced itself to blocks of twenty-four-hours, each of them filled with the angst of survival. This was no time for ambition or dreaming… but I allowed myself a tiny streak of hope, like the first slash of dawn as morning cuts through night. Thin but luminous hope sustained me that I might live to see the world at peace again, that I would make it through whatever fresh trauma came our way in order to bear witness to a Nazi humiliation.
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Madeline Martin ‘The Last Bookshop in London’
There was power to Churchill’s voice as he spoke that made determination pound in Grace’s chest and brought tears to Mrs. Weatherford’s eyes as she nodded to the new prime minister’s message.
Yes, there had been a great defeat, but they would carry on. The spirit of his words charged through London like lightning, crackling with power.
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The afternoons when sheltering wasn’t necessary were Grace’s favourite. Mr. Evans had procured a thick pillow for her to use as she sat upon the second step of the winding stairs, and she never once had to compete with a whistling bomb. It was on one such quiet, rainy afternoon she first saw the boy in the back as she read South Riding. The book had resonated with her after she’d read it on George’s recommendation.
It is through books that we can find the greatest hope, he had written in his tight, neat script. Words the censor had no cause to cut away. You remain ever in my thoughts.
And truly, South Riding was a book of great inspiration. Set after the Great War as communities came together and a headmistress inspired hope in a place where there was little to be had. It was an empowering tale about people who could overcome whatever life threw at them.
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“I appreciate what all of you have helped Primrose Hill Books become.” Grace continued. “Books are what have brought us together. A love of the stories within, the adventures they take us on, their glorious distraction in a time of strife. And a reminder that we always have hope.”
“Even if we don’t have Primrose Hill Books…” Grace cradled Jane Eyre to her chest. “Remember that we will always have books, and therefore we will always have courage and optimism.”
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National Action Alliance For Suicide Protection 2014
Hope is a key protective factor against suicidal behaviour, and it is a catalyst for the recovery process.
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Henri Nouwen
Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown.
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Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness.
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Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.
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Susan Orlean ‘The Library Book’
I was struck by how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.
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Parker J. Palmer
Hope keeps me alive and creatively engaged with the world.
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Chaim Potok ‘The Gift of Asher Lev’
I have lived with the hope that perhaps there are not two realms, the sacred world of God and the profane world of Gentile art, but that great art can also be for the sake of heaven.
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Without the future there is no present, Without the future there can be no hope for redemption, and without hope for redemption there is nothing.
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Marilynne Robinson ‘Home’
Hope is a very valuable thing, since there is not always so much to rejoice about in this life.
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Robert H. Schuller
Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.
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Dutch Sheets ‘The Power of Hope’
Quote: “Hope is the immune system of the human soul.” (Rev. Sean Smith)
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Hope will enable you to overcome the pain of your loss, the stigma of your shame, and the paralysing power of fear.
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Hope will become your lifeline; your stabiliser.
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Without hope life is sterile, unfruitful. Without it dreams won’t be conceived; destinies won’t be realised.
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Hope is the incubator where faith is formed.
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If there is no hope for the future there will be no faith to face it.
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Hope is to the heart what seeds are to the earth.
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To be without hope is to start the dying process. Hopelessness, if not checked, is a death sentence.
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The loss of hope is crippling, making us little more than spectators in life.
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Hope deferred is the common cold of the soul, except that this virus can kill.
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The loss of hope produces resignation, fear, unbelief, loss of passion, retreat from life, and a host of other heart disease maladies.
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The loss of hope imprisons the soul.
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Quote: “No matter what life brings to us, we can recalibrate our hearts and set ourselves on a course to trust God, receive, and walk in hope.” (Pastor Beni Johnson)
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You don’t have to be well to hope, but you do have to hope to become well.
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In spite of the impossibility of my situation, I will hope anyway.
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Quote: “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to it.” (Ruben Aves)
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Rebecca Solnit ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’
The ordinary and the extraordinary need each other, or rather everyday life needs to be interrupted from time to time – which is not to say that we need disaster, only that it sometimes supplies the interruption in which the other work of society is done. Carnival and revolution are likewise interruptions of everyday life, but their point is to provide something that allows you to return to that life with more power, more solidarity, more hope.
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Rebecca Solnit ‘Hope in the Dark’
Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.
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Quote: “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
(Maria Popova, Bulgarian writer).
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Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
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Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.
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Power comes from the shadows and the margins. Our hope is in the dark around the edges, not in the limelight of centre stage.
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Hope is the basis for action.
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Quote: “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.” (Walter Brueggeman, theologian).
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To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
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Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.
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Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.
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Hope means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.
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To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.
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Jill Stark ‘Happy Never After’
The most fundamental of human qualities – the capacity for hope and perseverance.
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Helplessness was an appealing familiar place that would have allowed me to abdicate all control and give up, railing against the hand I’d been dealt. Handing the reins to despair and anger only entrenches our suffering. Finding hope and gratitude in that dark night of the soul allowed me to tap into a part of myself I didn’t know was there but I now suspect had always existed. I discovered that it is not our greatest joys that have the power to transform but our deepest pain. The things we think will destroy us are so often the pathways to growth and healing.
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Joni Eareckson Tada
The best we can hope for in this life is a knothole peek at the shining realities ahead. Yet a glimpse is enough. It’s enough to convince our hearts that whatever sufferings and sorrows currently assail us aren’t worthy of comparison to that which waits over the horizon
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Miriam Toews ‘All My Puny Sorrows’
Elf had been inspired by the ochre paintings on the rock, by their impermeability and their mixed message of hope, reverence, defiance, and eternal aloneness.
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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
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Majok Tulba ‘When Elephants Fight’
Hope will keep you strong, even when everything else deserts you.
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You did what you could. You survived. Now what you have to do is keep your hope alive. Because without it, we’re as weak and fragile as grass in a summer fire.
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Desmond Tutu
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.
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Ann Voskamp
Hope is what holds a breaking heart together.
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The moment we let hope die, part of us dies.
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As long as you still are, all is not lost. Being is hope, and hope is presence, and this present moment is a gift pulsing with hope.
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Hope doesn’t promise success to the strong, but resurrection to the wrecked.
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You have to keep holding on to Hope to keep holding on.
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Life’s under no obligation to give us what we hope for – but we all hope for a life that gives us hope over and over again.
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To live is to hope.
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You may not know where you lost some of your Hope – and you never know when Hope will find you again.
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You have to keep finding your Hope when you’ve lost it, or you lose your way.
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You have to let Hope always carry you or fears will carry you away.
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Hope only seems lost – when you can’t find a way forward.
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No matter where you are – in the unknown and unfamiliar – Hope is like a homing pigeon that knows how to find its way back home to you.
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Hope’s just up ahead nodding that it’s going to be okay – you will be okay.
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Hold fast to Hope – for if Hope ebbs away, you become a broken wing who cannot fly.
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Hope is the thing with wings
That lands at the end of you
And shows you how to open to possibilities
So you never close again.
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Jesmyn Ward ‘Men We Reaped’
I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.
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Michael Whatling ‘The French Baker’s War’
Hope is the one bird in a thousand that soars above the others regardless of the weather.
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Being disappointed means having hope.
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Twinges of hope invigorate him, shocking as a plunge into a lake in winter.
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The priest clears his throat. ‘We never know what God has written on each of our temples. I choose to believe mine is HOPE. Yours is something you must uncover for yourself. If you believe in nothing else, believe that with love stars can shine through your soul.
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Isn’t wishful thinking simply diluted hope for those who have had it beaten out of them?
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Penelope Wilcock
Life is sustained by hope, in all of us.
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Philip & Carol Zaleski ‘The Fellowship’
“Belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, logos over chaos, bestowed upon all the oppositions in his life – scholarship and art, male friendship and marriage, high spirits and despair – a final and satisfying unity, a deep and abiding joy.” (J. R. R. Tolkien on ‘Hope’)
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We are in a pagan world, consoled by intimations of Gospel hope, rumours of grace. Hence, do not expect God to show his hand; nor, for that matter, does a wise Christian claim knowledge of the exact workings of grace. Help comes “unlooked-for” –
Optimism must die so that hope unlooked-for – or, in Lewis’s words, “good news, news beyond hope” – may live.(C. S. Lewis)
Hope For Tomorrow 