Hope

"For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout."

"Don’t ever discount the cry of your heart. God may be working in your heart to bring about his sovereign plan."

"I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I’d already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it. I still planned to try my hand at prayer. If God would grant me this one request, if I could keep my only friend, I would give anything in return, even the treasured books trapped beneath my arm. I’d tasted enough of a dismal life to know that a real, true friend was of greater worth than the collection of every imagined fairytale in the world."

"God didn’t design your life so you would constantly fall down, but he does hope that you will be brought to your knees."

"To love is to respect."

"If all else fails, we then factor (fall) into our equation. And pray hard, someone factors (catching us) into theirs."

"Though sleep was dearly needed, it was not welcomed, for even in sleep I was tormented."

"I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it."

"Hope is the moonlight filtering through the trees,Hope is the silent prayer that we make in distress,Hope is the promise that we make to ourselves,Hope is the happiness that we visualize, Hope is the horizon that we reach, if we try!"

"It's hard to criticize someone if you are praying for them."

"But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you."

"Flames burn so long as they are fed. Rivers rage so long as it rains. The sun rises so long as the earth rotates. Prayers are answered so long as they are uttered. Hope exists so long as there is a new day. Miracles never cease so long as there is faith. Love endures so long as kindness rules all actions. Dreams thrive so long as they are pursued. Never give up so long as you live."

"If you think you are unworthy to pray, that thought is not coming from Jesus Christ. More than anything, He wants us to approach Heavenly Father, to have our prayers heard and answered."

"Prayer enables you to tap into God’s wisdom anywhere, anytime, no matter what’s going on."

"Reading is a beautiful prayer for knowledge."

"Music is the sweetest language for hearts, kindest prayer for souls, peaceful breeze for minds, and a magical sail for imaginations."

"Kindness is my prayer. Humanity is my abode."

"It is not enough to hope for something to happen and throw it into the universe. You, too, must also work to make it happen."

"We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep"; beseeching Him of His mercy, that as in the beginning He discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so He would now discover land to us, that we might not perish."

"Silence might be a shout for the truth. It might be the speech that someday, in its truest, most uncontaminated, unadulterated state, all will be revealed."