This page may well become one of those cheesy repositories of quotes you read on Pinterest.  But some of them are really good.  For example, this blog was motivated at least in part by this sentiment:

“If you want something you’ve never had, you’ll have to do something you’ve never done.”

Voila.

But I don’t want cheese to be the motivating factor here.  I write about hope because it’s vital.  It’s another word for love, for beauty, for the sacred; it’s the thing that keeps us sane and civil (insofar as we are, in fact, sane and civil). It moves within us as individuals and among us as peoples, and we don’t spend near enough time with it.  So consider this a prompt.  And to help, here’s my favorite hope quote:

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.”

-Barbara Kingsolver, “Animal Dreams”