Hope

"Now domestication and sophistication of men by women are the norm and acceptable by society, but they are terrible for manhood."

"When you serve the humanity and contribute to the society without expectation, you are happy."

"True education should teach us how to think, how to see the beauty in the midst of ugliness, how to love without judging, how to find opportunity to help, and how to develop a peaceful and nonviolent society."

"a delegate shout out from the floor: “Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!” And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America’s future."

"Fear is a disease of mind we inherit from society."

"Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders."

"What if you'd live every day as if you were our society's future and hope?"

"I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them."

"One way [to recovery] would be by creating the best possible romance book or happy ending scenario for you ... out od your own experience. Another way would be to look at it as it is: a wake-up call to action to create a more humane world, without discrimination and sexism."

"(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air --(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace of God --(The above made up by professional hope experts, you might say, because willful, voluntary, intentional hope was the only kind they had in anything like long supply. Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet; it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, that old Eternal Now. So that you end up living not in the future ((in your intentional "act of faith")) but in the present. Afte"

"For now the world keeps turning and I keep breathing, in and out, in and out. I breathe in the life that is all around me, in this garden, in this city, in the fields beyond it, in the seas beyond them and the shores on the other side; life that reaches out towards the unreachable, unknowable space that is beyond all of us and the stars that burn there."

"The more I learn about life and people, the more I realise that everyone has a story and everyone’s story is the biggest in their own mind.” - Laylla Jonson"

"His kiss was light but lingering, like smoke from shivering lips on a freezing winter morning."

"Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning."

"One of the things about writing that inspires--and impresses me, is the music words can make. And, like music, the spaces between the notes can mean as much as the notes themselves. -- The Jesus Horse"

"You have filled every fibre of my soul and the spaces in between"

"That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again."

"Both tears and sweat are salty. but none of them are faulty. the tears can get you somewhere, the sweat will make you only wet."

"It all begins, I maintain, with that powerful and underutilized thing called love. God's love for the individual is displayed by those people who reflect his love in their words and deeds. It ultimately gets understood and accepted by the child in poverty, and through that individual's love for others, the world gets changed."

"They are funny little representatives of simplicity, of awareness. No one is more aware of themselves as these children are. They have nothing, have no one but us, have seemingly no reason to be hopeful...yet they are. They choose to be happy even though the obviously easier choice would be to be frightened or sad and they have real reason to be those things as well. But they have life and faith and hope and love and they choose those things. Their innocence is addicting, their hope is catching and I'm happy to be surrounded by them."