Simon Raven Quotes

Why do people play the lottery, or why do people gamble, period? You know, it's with the hope of winning something more.

Please God, let me hit one. I'll tell everybody you did it.

I got to that desperate place where nobody could help me but God.

There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint,'Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery.' This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue come to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust,'My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket.

God, I am afraid he won't give me his answer today. If only somebody would help me - it is all so terribly depressing.

The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, 'O God, forgive me,' or 'Help me.'

'Revelations' is one of the most important pieces to the African American arts. It assesses the hope and despair of a people and overcoming the struggle with our faith.

I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.

People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.

Dear God, let this be just a bad nightmare.

When you strip hope from people, it leaves a void, and that void needs to be filled. And very likely, that void is going to be filled by an ideology... Hope and faith are so connected. Now, when ideology connects with faith, the ideology becomes an item of faith, not a point of discussion.

The people of our city are holding on by a thread. Time has run out. Can we survive another night? And who can we depend on? Only God knows.

I know no words of prayer - God help me because I can not help myself.

God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.

Everybody has some sorrow, worry, and everybody asks God for help.

My acting technique is to look up at God just before the camera rolls and say, 'Give me a break.'

If you have no faith, you've lost your battle.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console, To be understood as to understand, To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

One bright sunny morning In the shadow of the steeple By the Relief Office I saw my people-- As they stood hungry I stood there wondering If God blessed America for me.

When things get bad enough, your only resort is to lie in bed and start praying.

Say a prayer for the lost generation, who spin the wheel out of desperation.

So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.