"The air smelled of sun-warmed bark and apple buds raring to blossom and get on with life.  Overhead, a million baby leaves danced in the breeze."

Kathy Reichs

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."
~ Jack Layton

"A wish has been defined as a 'goal with no energy behind it.' Hope is not a strategy."
~ Brian Tracy

"Be a rainbow in someone else's cloud." 

~Maya Angelou

"Not a day passes over this earth but men and women of note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows."

-- Charles Reed

"The one resolution, which was in my mind long before it took the form of a resolution, is the key-note of my life.  It is this, always to regard as mere impertinences of fate the handicaps which were placed upon my life almost at the beginning.  I resolved that they should not crush or dwarf my soul, but rather be made to  blossom, like Aaron's rod,  with flowers.

- Helen Keller (1880-1968)

 “There is no tomorrow. There is only today, and living for today. Because we just don’t know what can happen tomorrow.”


~ Cristobal, Haitian Staff (driver), for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

"Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil; our great hope lies in developing what is good. "

-- Calvin Coolidge

"What is the reason for this attitude of the developed Nations? In the Twentieth Century self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one, became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support or resources to the world's trouble spots. If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If not, indifference is the order of the day. To imagine that these same world powers have magically leapt ahead in this new age of humanity (as Kofi Anan named it in his seminal speech at the millennium UN General Assembly in September, 2000) could not be further from the truth. It will take the world's dedicated will and means to move from the 20th century - the century of 'Genocide' to the century of Humanity."

~ Lt.General Romeo Dallaire, the Head of Mission of the U N Chapter 6 Peace Keeping Force in Rwanda

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail,
not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
--Baruch Spinoza

"All this pain can't stop my believing,
And all this joy can't stop my grieving..."

~ Graham Shaw ("Drunk Again", 'Raw Shaw')

"I am a prisoner of hope."

~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu