hope.

This is the human way, she thought. On the edge of destruction, at the end of all things, we still dance. And hope.
Rosamund Hodge, Crimson Bound

I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope In The Dark

I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
Jane Hirshfield, Hope and Love

Years will pass, and you will have visitings of despair and yet be tortured by hope.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you’ve been disappointed so often before.
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew

How lightly we learn to hold hope,
as if it were an animal that could turn around
and bite your hand. And still we carry it
the way a mother would, carefully,
from one day to the next.
Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August, "Insha'Allah"

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.
Václav Havel

I think it’s very dangerous not to have hope. And if you can’t have hope, I think we need a little awe, or a little wonder, or at least a little curiosity.
Ada Limón, On Being with Krista Tippett, “To Be Made Whole”