Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean Kerr

Hope, in Jean Kerr's hands, isn't a noble banner waving over adversity; it's a small, almost sly psychological hack. The line turns on a playful double-back: "Hope is the feeling" that "the feeling you have" isn't permanent. By nesting feeling inside feeling, Kerr captures how emotion operates in real life, not in greeting-card life. When you're stuck in grief, panic, boredom, or shame, the world doesn't just look bad; it looks fixed. Despair's nastiest trick is permanence. Kerr names hope as the counter-spell: not certainty that things will improve, but the loosening of the mind's grip on "this is how it is now, therefore this is how it will be."

The wit is doing real work. Kerr was a mid-century playwright and humorist who made a career out of domestic realism sharpened into comedy. Her world isn't epic battlefields; it's kitchens, marriages, bad news at inconvenient hours. In that context, redefining hope as a second-order feeling (a feeling about your feelings) is both compassionate and a little irreverent. It doesn't ask you to be brave; it asks you to be accurate about time.

The subtext is quietly radical: you don't need a plan, a cure, or even optimism to access hope. You just need the tiniest crack in the story your nervous system is telling you. It's therapeutic without sounding like therapy, funny without being flippant, and honest about how low the bar often is when you're barely getting through the day.