Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

What drunkenness is this that brings me hope

Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope.

If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us - to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here.

But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.

Man is a victim of dope
In the incurable form of hope.

Man is a victim of dope
In the incurable form of hope!

Like a surgeon's scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us. Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is not always clear.

"There's such a thing as too much hope...It's like a black hole: you fall in, and there's no bottom. That's why [he] is the way he is: he can't tell the difference between what's possible, and what's not." (Part 6, p257)

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.

Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn’t let go.

For true it is, good oft befalls us when we least expect it. And true it is, that when we trust in hope, we’re often disappointed.

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

Don’t hope. Hope is for people who aren’t prepared.