Hope Spot/Quotes

You have to give them hope. If you bring a human being to the brink of death, and then you offer a chance, no matter how small a chance, to survive, they'll grab it. And they'll thank you for it. And then, you can do whatever you want. And believe me, I did.

—Nate Haskell, CSI

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.

—Brian Stimpson, Clockwise

It would be typical of the followers of Chaos to perpetuate such a hoax, if only to give desperate humans a shadow of hope that could be snatched away.

—Hammer of Daemons

Little did I imagine, my dear Mother, when I sent off my last letter, that the delightful perturbation of spirits I was then in would undergo so speedy, so melancholy a reverse.

—Catherine Vernon, Lady Susan by Jane Austen

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

—Imperial maxim, Warhammer 40,000

I tell you, Ugly. There's nothing funnier than false hope. You really thought you had a chance there for a second.

—Xykon, Order of the Stick

Rex: Woody! Look, I can see daylight! We're gonna be OK!

Woody: ...I don't think that's daylight.

—Toy Story 3

I am INVINCIBLE!

—Boris Grishenko, last words, GoldenEye

Seriously, it's got to be Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly singing and dancing with aliens, right?

—The Nostalgia Chick getting excited for Xanadu before her hopes being dashed.

In the midst of any painful experience, there always comes a time when one first hopes that the worst is over. The dentist seems to be about to put away the drill, you suddenly reach a part of the cliff rich with handholds which seem to lead straight to the top. These expectations rarely turn out to be justified: the dentist has put down the drill to find a knife to cut the gum, the handholds are friable slate that lead to an overhang. Still, the delusion is a relief while it lasts, and in certain situations it may revive your enthusiasm sufficiently for you to make some real progress.

—John J. Reilly, "Imperial Populism", in Spengler's Future

Hey, that's a ladder! That means this is legit; this might actually go somewhere! I mean, it probably leads to a room filled with poison gas and a bunch of dead people that look just like me, but I don't know that, so there's room for hope, I guess.

—Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind

When hope seems to be at hand, but then you find it out of your reach, that is when your Despair becomes deepest.

—Nia Teppelin, Anti-Spiral , Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

FAA: but ultimately
FAA: we w0uld pr0ve 0ur w0rth
FAA: and the reward w0uld be within 0ur reach

FAA: but 0nly m0mentarily

—Aradia Megido, Homestuck

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train.

—Anonymous

Hope leaks into our lives by way of spreading cracks we always meant to repair but never did.

(Oddly enough, when the cracks yawn their widest and the promised deluge comes at last, it is not hope at all that finally breaks through and drowns us.)

—Thomas Ligotti, on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

I tried to revive what's already drowned
They think I'm a fool who can't realize
Hope plays a wicked game with the mind
'Cause I thought that love would bind
I cannot revive what's already drowned

She won't come around...

—Within Temptation, "Lost"

In my dream, the world had suffered a terrible disaster. A black haze shut out the sun, and the darkness was alive with the moans and screams of wounded people. Suddenly, a small light glowed. A candle flickered into life, symbol of hope for millions. A single tiny candle, shining in the ugly dark.

I laughed and blew it out.

—The Joker, Shadow Of The Bat #37

It's a thread thrown to a drowning man. It's an oasis shimmering in the distance. Barclay is not the kind of man to let wishful thinking trump the facts on the ground, but we are all in such desperate need of good news.
For a moment or two I almost think he's going to go for it.
But then he looks around at the huddled civilians under his protection, at the ragtag soldiers under his command, at the duct tape and chewing gum he's using to keep it all together, and I know exactly what lesson from Strategy 101 is going through his head: Never fight a war on two fronts. The oasis is a mirage.
....
But you know what really got him scared, Roger? You know what he really fears, now that he's just seen a whole platoon of Ceph turn into beef consommé before his eyes? I see it the moment they haul me into the VTOL: I see it in the look on his face as we dust off.
Hope.
....

What do you do when you've finally resigned yourself to your own inevitable extermination, and someone offers you a way out? Any hope in a place like this almost has to be false; all it can do is shake your determination, tempt you with thoughts of after this is over when you should just be thinking about getting the job done now. Hope is distraction, hope is fear undercutting resolve, because hope gives you back that most terrible of battlefield commodities: something to lose.

—Crysis: Legion