Hoping Against Hope Quotes & Sayings

Her dad brought his hands together and popped a knuckle.
"Trevor," Frances said soothingly, rubbing her hand on his back. But she was looking hard at me over her glasses, telling me upstanding citizens did not act this way.
When we were kids, that look from Frances could make Lori and her brother behave, and sometimes even my brothers, but I never seemed to get the message.
"I saw you coming out of the woods," Lori's dad shouted at me. "Together!"
"We weren't rolling in the leaves or anything. Look, no evidence." I put my other hand on Lori's other shoulder and turned her around backward, hoping against hope
she didn't have scratches from the tree on her bare back, or bark on her butt.
"Get your hands off my daughter. — Jennifer Echols

This'll keep me safe, Mother! I've the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t'quaderatics! Come one, Mother, stop fretting and come wi' me now to t'barn. You must see 'er!' Mrs. Simnel, reluctant, was dragged by her son to the great open barn he had knitted out like the workshop back at Sheepridge, hoping against hope that her son had accidentally found himself a girl. — Terry Pratchett

I think that perhaps we always fall in love the very first instant we see the man of our dreams, even though, at the time, reason may be telling us otherwise, and we may fight against that instinct, hoping against hope that we won't win, until there comes a point when we allow ourselves to be vanquished by our feelings. — Paulo Coelho

I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do. — Bill Murray

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool. — Jeremy Clarkson

Men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules, wherein they are deceived because they afterward find by experience they have gone from bad to worse. — Niccolo Machiavelli

We are a boatful of monsters and miracles, hoping that. Somehow, we can survive a world in which all hands are against us. A world which. By all evidence will end extremely soon. Yet I posit we are in a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can only be continuances. If we are in such a universe, as I hope, then we may have a chance — Neil Gaiman

That's what Hanukkah is about: trying to survive the darkness on the far-fetched hope there's still some life and light left in the universe. It's more than just a religious story. The days have been growing shorter, imperceptibly but inescapably darker ... Heading into the night of the winter solstice, every spiritual tradition has some kind of festival of light. We're all just whistling in the dark, hoping against hope that someone up there will see these little Hanukkah candles and get the hint. — Lawrence Kushner

I stop dead in my tracks when I see Nash leaning against the wall right outside the ladies' room. His legs are crossed casually at the ankle, as his arms are crossed casually over his chest. His smile is faint. And sad.
Finally, he straightens and steps toward me. He doesn't stop until he is mere inches from me, forcing me to tilt my face up just to maintain eye contact.
He brushes his thumb over the ridge of my cheekbone at the corner of my eye. I wonder briefly if I missed a streak of mascara.
"I'm so sorry," he whispers, closing his eyes as if in pain. His face is etched with regret and it tugs at my heart.
"Don't be. You can't control other people. I just hope I haven't embarrassed you too badly, or ruined any important business connections you were hoping to make."
"I don't care about business connections. Not at this cost. — M. Leighton

Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Are you sure you're not a witch?" he teased lightly, his teeth nipping at the sensitive lobe of my ear.
My stomach twittered excitedly and I leaned into him.
"If I'm a witch, you're a devil," I returned breathlessly, hoping against hope that he wouldn't stop, that we could just continue on in our little bubble of oblivion.
Jackson chuckled, a sound that sent chills racing down my back.
"Now that's entirely possible," Jackson admitted, leaning back to grin down into my face. When his eyes settled on mine, his smile died and I fell headlong into the intensity of his sky blue gaze. "I love you. — M. Leighton

I don't find imitating other people's music easy at all. I remember being fifth in line for a Rolling Stones tour, early '90s, when Bill Wyman left, and I was hoping against hope that I wouldn't get the call to audition. I wouldn't be able to play a Stones song if you put a gun to my head. — Peter Hook

If we could build an economy that would use things rather than use them up, we could build a future. — Ellen MacArthur

As for Ms. Banks's claim that she didn't even notice that the gang rapists were Mexican and their victim white, YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. The media always notice race. It is the first thing they look for in any crime - hoping against hope to have finally found Tom Wolfe's "great white defendant." They'll even turn a Hispanic perpetrator white, as the New York Times did with George Zimmerman. After the police shooting in Ferguson, did anyone need to ask: Hey, does anyone know the race of the cop or the race of the guy he shot? — Ann Coulter

Care2, you can click on a variety of causes; then advertisers and other sponsors will make a charitable contribution on your behalf (usually ranging from a few pennies to 25 cents). — Nicole Boles

Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you're right on the edge, but you don't go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. — Yvon Chouinard

The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth. — Aleksandar Hemon

He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined. — Charles Dickens

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species. — Alain De Botton

Atheistic evolution isn't an intelligent belief, as atheists would have the black community believe. — Ray Comfort

John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway. — Bill Bryson

The late Queen Victoria once paid a royal visit to a renowned library. At one point, the head librarian asked, "Your Majesty, might I please introduce my daughter to you?" The queen replied, "I have come here to view the library." — Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess Of Longford

Survival requires a dose of madness - what cynics call "hoping against hope" - just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. "Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us," observed one Holocaust expert. "Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst. — Mark Matousek

This was a very progressive group of clergy who foresaw the race riots that were going to take place when Dr. King started helping the local civil rights community push for open housing. They were sort of hoping against hope that we could educate kids in a way that could counter some of the racist messages they were imbibing at home. I don't know whether we did any good, but it changed my life in every single way. — Sara Paretsky

All of a sudden I found I was hoping against hope that the penguin would survive, because, as of that instant, he had a name and his name was Juan Salvador Pinguino and with his name came a surge of hope and the beginning of a bond that would last a lifetime. That was the moment at which he became my penguin, and whatever the future held, we'd face it together. — Tom Michell

The brain is closer to the skull, — Randy Carlyle

There is no point winning the semi if you don't win the final. It's as simple as that. No one will remember a big semifinal if you lose the final, so you have to do it all again. — Brian O'Driscoll

for men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse. This — Niccolo Machiavelli

At the beginning of the month I wrote a letter to Santa - I know, childish - but I needed something to hope for, even if it felt silly."
He smiled and shifted to sit by my side, winding his arm around my wait. "Wishing and hoping is never silly, Harper," he whispered, nipping my jaw.
I leaned into his hold and twined our fingers. "I had two things on it: you, and to be accepted." I stared at the black ink marking my letter in my messy handwriting.
He pressed his forehead against my temple. "You were on mine too, only, I didn't send it to Santa. — Shaye Evans

I was hoping against hope he'd refill his Prozac so we could be in love again, but, sadly, that never happened. — Piper Faust

My first film was a movie shot in 1974. I was 18 on that movie set. It was called 'Big Bad Mama.' I turned 19 on the next movie I worked on, which was a black 'Blazing Saddles.' I worked in the art department. It was called 'Darktown Strutters.' — Bill Paxton

And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope. — Soren Kierkegaard

I am become a blade. — Leigh Bardugo

I rush to her side and touch her cold skin, hoping against hope for a pulse. — Steven Herrick

I do know without fear of contradiction what the definition of life is and it is 12 words long. 'Life is defined by how much you improve the lives of others.' — Keith Olbermann

I can't imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else's well-loved child. — Stephen King

Unfortunately my parents had recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested they should adopt — Marcel Proust

She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be. — Kate Morton

I hate unbreakable alibis--they are usually the first to crack.
--Hugo Anstead — Jennifer A. Girardin

Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before. — C.S. Lewis