Hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances and the capacity to surmount them.

I had learned that every patient has the right to hope, despite long odds, and it was my role to help nurture that hope.

I feel that I have to do everything better just to be judged as okay. It is something I wish I could let go of. It's something that I wish just wasn't there.

Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind's eye - a path to a better future.

Hope, true hope, has proved as important as any medication I might prescribe or any procedure I might perform.

Many years before when I had serious back pain from a sports injury, the surgeons said they would explore my spine and "figure it out." Out of frustration I had impulsively opted for the procedure. They ended up fusing the vertebrae. It left me debilitated. In hindsight, I blamed myself more than the surgeons. I had pressed them for a solution when in fact none was apparent because the cause of the pain was obscure.

Hope differs from optimism. Hope does not arise from being told to "think positively," or from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality.