Pamela Druckerman Quotes

I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.

I have a lot of friends that take that position of extreme cynicism, and I just can't let myself go to that place. It's just too easy, and it's just too defeatist.

I get tired of negativity in our country. I get tired of people who only want to know dirt. I get tired of people who don't believe in themselves.

You have to try to dismiss the loudness of cynicism. It's certainly going to come.

I am an optimistic lady.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

Optimism is cowardice.

I was just stunned when I came to America. I didn't know anything about rock music or football, and I felt very out of it... America was like a foreign country to me at first.

It fails everybody, pretty much, the American Dream, but people are driven by it. I don't think we're driven by the same sense of hope in Europe. We're driven by pessimism more.

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

You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

We always get rejections, whether it's in love or anything in life. And then negativity tends to creep in. But hopefully we are honest towards the people around us so that we can conquer it.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happy.

We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.

In optimism there is magic. In pessimism there is nothing.

Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

I wouldn't say 'most' people are prone to negativity. I think it's probably that most people allow negativity to color their thinking, depending on circumstances, but I also believe most people make the necessary efforts to return to positive thinking as quickly as possible.

You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.

I have often been downcast, but never in despair.

But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked. "Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.