Susan Beth Pfeffer Quotes

People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?

I keep my cuttings for when I'm back on the bins. I believe that it's not going to last. At least I will be able to say, 'I lived.'

This, I think, is how people survive: Even when horrible things have been done to us, we can still find gratitude in one another.

We don't know what's happened out there since they put us in here, or how many generations have lived and died since they did.We could be the last people left.

I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me.

Angelus: Now that's everything, huh? No weapons... No friends...No hope. Take all that away... and what's left? Buffy: Me.

Life goes on with fragile normalcy.

She believes in love and romance. She believes her life is one day going to be transformed into something wonderful and exciting. She has hopes and fears and worries, just like anyone. Sometimes she feels frightened. Sometimes she feels unloved. Sometimes she feels she will never gain approval from those people who are most important to her. But she’s brave and good-hearted and faces her life head-on.

In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.

I've seen optimism because I grew up in communities of recovery where people put their lives back together and find tomorrows that they didn't think would be there. That fundamentally changed my life and is so much of where my hope comes from.

Shall I tell you what supported me through all those years of exile among a people whose language I could not understand and whose attitude towards me we always uncertain and often hostile? It was this: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world".

We Shall come through! We cannot tell when, we cannot tell how, but we shall come through.

The reason I don’t worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I’ll take those odds every f*cking day.

So go ahead and make your way Back from the edge of yesterday No one knows what Can't be known 'Cause when you start You're all alone But take enough steps Take enough steps Take enough steps And someday Someday you'll be home ---Heather Wells, Untitled

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair.

It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.

No one knows what is going to happen in the next few minutes, and yet people still go forward, because they have trust, because they have faith.

My idea is to give hope, because where there is no hope, there is no vision, and where there is no vision, people will perish.

We got a right to climb out of the sewer and live like other people. We could start from scratch. Make every minute count twice for the one we lost.

The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave.

Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.

And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.