“The positive emotions that arise in…unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.”

“By the time the last few notes fade, his hope will be restored, but each time he’s force to resort to the Adagio it becomes harder, and he knows its effect is finite. There are only a certain number of Adagios left in him, and he will not recklessly spend this precious currency. ”

“Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however . . . Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers.”

“…This is the arena in which a spiritualized disobedience means most. It doesn’t mean a second New Deal, another massive bureaucratic attack on our problems. It doesn’t mean taking to the streets, throwing bricks through the window at the Bank of America, or driving a tractor through the local McDonald’s. It means living differently. It means taking responsibility for the character of the human world. That’s a real confrontation with the problem of value. In short, refusal of the present is a return to what Thoreau and Ruskin called “human fundamentals, valuable things,” and it is a movement into the future. This movement into the future is also a powerful expression of that most human spiritual emotion, Hope.p.124”

“The journey through another world, beyond bad dreamsbeyond the memories of a murdered generation,cartographed in captivity by bare survivorsmakes sacristans of us all.The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.Be careful, they say, don’t hock the beads of kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymnsupon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voicetransforms the ways of song to words of poetry or proseand makes distinctionsno one recognizes.Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscanson the edge of useless law; we prayto the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistlein ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chainof incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome.”

“Hope can be imagined as a domino effect, a chain reaction, each increment making the next increase more feasible… There are moments of fear and doubt that can deflate it.”

“Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them. ”

“Because now that it’s finally morning, the shadows are beginning to fade, the shadows that have been covering my mind and my soul. Now that they’re gone, I can almost start to see the way, and it’s different from the one they’d convinced me was all I could have.”

“How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?”

“ i had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth”

“The morning was full of sunlight and hope.”

“It’s the smell of him in the bathroom, all I need to get ready for the day. Watching him get dressed, and the sound in the kitchen; a slow hum of a song and his movements, picking things to eat. The way I could observe him, for hours, just go on with his day – or as he sleeps – simply breathing in and out, in and out, and it’s like the hymn that sings me to peace. I know the world is still out there and I know I’m not yet friendly to its pace, but as long as I know him with me, here, there, somewhere – us – I know I have a chance.”

“The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language for her experience. She discovers that she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways. She discovers further that she is not crazy; the traumatic syndromes are normal human responses to extreme circumstances. And she discovers, finally, that she is not doomed to suffer this condition indefinitely; she can expect to recover, as others have recovered…”

“NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of manIn me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”

“Do try to remember this: even the world’s not so black as it is painted”-Valerie to Stephen (pg. 408)”