“Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise – silently, thank god, though at night, he recounted choice bits to Kate: “Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I’m sure they’ll keep you, too.”Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it, They must keep me. Family.”

“I’ll be singing hymns to the rafters, be praising His goodness so loud they’re going to have to turn down the volume in Heaven.”

“I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades — stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus — then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense — a worse boon than despair.”

“Dullness it is that perverts and corrups the spirit but it is always possible to look past the dullness, and see the bright, shining heart of things”

“Plain Kate greased her boots and bandaged her feet, and soon she would walk like a Roamer born. She helped Drina with the water and the wood, and in the long, wet evenings she carved objarka burji.Plain Kate carved fast and learned slowly. She was bewildered most of the time, but Daj called her mira again, and when she asked Drina what it meant, the girl replied, “It means she likes you. It means your family.”Family. It could have kept her walking for a hundred miles. And she did walk far.”

“These early Saints were indeed homeless, but they were not hopeless. Their hearts were broken, but their spirits were strong. They had learned a profound and important lesson. They had learned that hope, with its attendant blessings of peace and joy, does not depend upon circumstance. They had discovered that the true source of hope is faith—faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His infinite Atonement, the one sure foundation upon which to build our lives.”

“… but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.”

“Hope is the last thing that dies.Maybe because hope is one of those dratted things that is truly, honestly, genuinely immortal.”

“Now I want you to remember something because I don’t think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.”

“If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.”

“There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, andnot in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever ismore than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or Icould not live.”

“She’d stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn’t soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn’t be on you; And no wanting what you couldn’t take, because the world never gave.Or so she’d thought.”

“From Les Miserables:All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night; women’s voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure accents of virgins and the innocent accent of children, — voices which are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of angels was approaching through the gloom.Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that they must kneel.These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house. While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.”

“[Koudelka] looked back, “You?! I know you! You trust beyond reason!”[Cordelia] met his eyes steadily, “Yes, it’s how I get results beyond hope, as you may recall.”

“It took more than science to make hope real.”