Geoff Dyer Quotes

Hope is a dream deferred.

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

And as far as false hope, there is no such thing. There is only hope or the absence of hope-nothing else.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

My hopes are not always realized, but I always hope.

Hope is the only good that is common to all men; those who have nothing else possess hope still.

Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope.

Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.

God's most precious commodity—hope .... When a child has no hope a nation has no future.

Hope is universal.

Hope is in some respects a thing more brilliant, more vivifying, than fruition. What we have looked forward to with eager and earnest aspiration is never in all respects equal to the picture we had formed of it. The very uncertainty enhances the enjoyment.

When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

"Hope, you see, Wal'r," said the Captain, sagely, "Hope. It's that as animates you. Hope is a buoy, for which you overhaul your Little Warbler, sentimental diwision, but Lord, my lad, like any other buoy, it only floats; it can't be steered nowhere. Along with the figure-head of Hope,' said the Captain, 'there's a anchor; but what's the good of my having a anchor, if I can't find no bottom to let it go in?"

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

Cynicism stems from disappointment. Cynical and faithless people were not always like that. They were filled with possibilities and hope as kids. But they tried and perhaps failed.