Hope > Hope's Quotes

“I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“And they had folded his brother's hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.”
― Kent Haruf, Eventide

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”
― Tom Waits

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.”
― Tom Waits

“Well I got a bad liver and broken heart,
yeah,I drunk me a river since you
tore me apart”
― Tom Waits

“You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.”
― Tom Waits

“I've lost my equilibrium, my car keys, and my pride.”
― Tom Waits

“Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs”
― Tom Waits

“Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On”
― Tom Waits

“The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -”
― Janette Turner Hospital , The Last Magician

“What comes before and after we know not.”
― Janette Turner Hospital, North of Nowhere, South of Loss

“FLIGHT OF FOLLY. WOMAN TRAPPED IN CAGE OF OPEN DOORS.”
― Janette Turner Hospital, North of Nowhere, South of Loss

“Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.”
― Wally Lamb

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”
― Angela Carter

“but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what.”
― Kate Chopin

“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and Selected Stories

“The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else shall be of any consequence.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn't seem like the same woman.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others-”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“And moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul . . . the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.”
― Kate Chopin

“No, I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”
― William Golding

“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
― Eudora Welty