Susan Beth Pfeffer Quotes

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is good company along the way.

What humanity needs today is not merely philosophy or theology, but a message or reassurance.

One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.

Insecurity and resignation mingle with the hope for a better order.

We have no firm hold on any knowledge or philosophy that can lift us out of our difficulties.

I think most people, no matter what their situation, manage to find joy and comfort in their daily lives. I also think things fall apart.

I'll give it a shot. But I don't know that a year from now I'm going to be here. Nobody does.

There is something supremely reassuring about television; the worst is always yet to come.

My prospects for life, though in a measure shaded with uncertainty, hardship and danger, are very animating and bright. My prospects for another life, blessed be God, are still brighter.

You can't bank on the outcome.

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

Hope and certainty are the enemies of peace.

Hope--danger's comforter

Hope founded upon a human being, a man-made philosophy or any institution is always misplaced... because these things are unreliable and fleeting.

I don't know what the future holds. All I know is, I'm good today. Real good.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.

If all you can promise me is today, I'll take it and hope for tomorrow.

Remember that the future is neither ours nor wholly not ours, so that we may neither count on it as sure to come nor abandon hope of it as certain not to be.

Trust in the process you are now experiencing. Life is on your side. It is showing that to you now, though you may not be able to see it clearly at this time.

Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

I'm always sorry when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure.

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

[H]owever hard the road, however difficult today, tomorrow things will be better. Tomorrow may not be better, but we must believe that it will be.