HAPPY NEW YEAR!
After the crazy 2020, a New Year has dawned today. To remain hopeful that it would be a better year for the world, I am presenting a set of literary quotations on hope and a better future.
Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier’…”
― Alfred Tennyson
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
― Anne Frank
Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.
― Langston Hughes
We can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
—George Eliot
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
—Arundhati Roy
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
—Frank Herbert
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
― Maya Angelou
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, … that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope.’
― Alexandre Dumas
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
― Emily Dickinson
The very least you can do in your life is 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.
― Barbara Kingsolver
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
― Leonard Cohen
You were born and with you endless possibilities, very few ever to be realized. It’s okay. Life was never about what you could do, but what you would do.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
One of the best things about life is friends. We all agree on that. And yet our shyness with strangers often prevents friendship from ever gaining a foothold. If only we would realize that the other person is probably just as shy as we are and is simply waiting—and hoping—for us to make the first move.
— Jerry Spinelli
Hope is a flower which refuses to be crushed under life’s brutal heel.
— John Mark Green
The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.
— Aaron Lauritsen
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
– Charlotte Bronte
So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they are impossible.
– Norton Juster
And, when you want, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.
– Paulo Coelho
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…
– Dr. Seuss
And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it’s the opposite, obviously. But I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.
– Sebastian Faulks
The future could go this way, that way. The future’s futures have never looked so rocky. Don’t put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It’s the real stuff, the only stuff, it’s all there is, the present, the panting present.
– Martin Amis
What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
You call yourself a free spirit, a ‘wild thing,’ and you’re terrified somebody gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.
– Truman Capote
Promise me you’ll remember: you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
– A.A. Milne
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
– John Steinbeck
Do not just seek happiness for yourself. Seek happiness for all. Through kindness. Through mercy.
– David Levithan
Maybe everyone can live beyond what they are capable of.
– Markus Zusak