Jay Asher Quotes

Your struggle is your strength. If you can resist becoming negative, bitter or hopeless, in time, your struggles will give you everything.

Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith.

I'm always optimistic.

There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.

Well, I'm an optimist.

Pessimism never won any battle.

I'm not pessimistic about anything.

I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

I'm annoyingly optimistic.

If you try and kind of focus on hope, but you know what it's like to be in the dark, then hope is more meaningful.

Having no expectations is a really good thing.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

I don't believe in the no-win scenario

The miserable have no other medicine But only hope.

Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb--that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully... which only reinforces that particular Lie.

Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.

My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties.

Carry on. Things will work out. If you keep trying and praying and working, things will work out. They always do. If you want to die at an early age, dwell on the negative. Accentuate the positive, and you’ll be around for a while.

Even in the most wretched life, there’s hope.

Trust can be a hard lesson; hope still more difficult.

I have often been downcast, but never in despair.

I'm not pessimistic, because poor people tend to bounce back. We've been through worse than this - working people been through worse than this. We've got slavery and Jim Crow. We've got workers with no rights up until '35. We're going to bounce back. We are resilient, resisting people. So, it's not pessimism, but it is blues-like. It's not optimistic. We're just prisoners of hope, that's all.

So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.

I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.