Hope

"The fastest and cheapest way to eradicate poverty is not by giving food but by giving hope, love, and education."

"No my friend, darkness is not everywhere, for here and there I find faces illuminated from within; paper lanterns among the dark trees."

"How could I have never told anyone what He had done for me? Nothing else had worked. Nothing had been able to break the chains that kept me living on the edge. Nothing...except the gentleness of His touch."

"Life's markers are never just for one moment in time. Every event holds a key. Each builds upon the other and becomes an indicator towards a higher purpose."

"Darkness I find myself set upon a ship of fools and cast adrift. Adrift in sea of madness, steaming towards a storm of uncertainty. Overboard, swirling, twirling tumbling. Engulfed in madness. Shipwrecked, marooned. Washed upon a rock of hope. Darkness surrounds. Within the darkness madness laps upon a distant shore. Morning breaks and sun rises once more. Darkness retreats into the shadows. Golden rays of light cleanse the mind and soul. A new day dawns heralding sanity, and hopefor the human race once more."

"Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free."

"There is always beauty to be found, even in the darkness."

"I wanted more than anything to connect to someone. I wanted to feel alive again. I just felt dead inside. I could understand how some people just gave up. This darkness was overwhelming."

"She had long been a cold and calculating person, and yet she had never given in to the darkness entirely. She would remember her mother's touch or the voice of a lost friend, and the tiniest bit of hope would return."

"Hope was always hard to find in the darkness."

"There are no words in that fleeting moment between hope and the knowledge. There is no way to express how a heart can burst and break at the same time, how the sun can cut through the darkness but will case shadows everywhere."

"A scientist does not have hope, sir. Hope is what a man has in the absence of answers, and once he does empirical experimentation, he replaces hope with knowledge and disappointment."

"Struggling transforms her captor into a Chinese finger trap. She’s suffocating. Sucking in air without relief. Her lungs expand. Contract. Expand. They fill with lies and broken promises. With despair and lost hope. Each inhale is empty. Invisible hands reach into her body and constrict around her windpipe. She watches her friends collapse like supernovae, their cognizance disappearing into a black hole. A black hole she’s quickly cascading into. The dark consumes, bleeds into her vision. She blinks. Catches icy blue eyes peeking out from the shadows."

"What hell condemned, let heaven now heal."

"Sometimes it is one step at a time, and things don’t always work out the way we would like them to, but as you allow God to direct you He will bring you to a place of peace."

"May hope rise within you. May peace wash over you."

"I show my scars so that others know they can heal."

"When i move through my pain, it clears the path for a new dawn, a new day. It is in these moments, i feel the sun rising on the horizon of hope, in my soul."

"Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy but, rather, a product of my thoughts."

"This book attempts to record a journey to restoration that applies to ordinary people like you and I. It is a shot towards healing. A step headed for a new consciousness. It emerges from a moment in time where all seems lost."