Time & Perspective Quote by Paula Cole

There is a quiet defiance in Paula Cole's "hope and believe" pairing: optimism, yes, but the kind that has to be willed into existence because the evidence has so often run the other way. Cole isn't just offering encouragement. She's staking a claim on progress as something built, not granted. "Paving" is the key verb - unglamorous, bodily, repetitive work. It suggests a road laid down under pressure, by people who are tired of being told to take the long way around.

The line also carries the soft-edged subtext of a survivor of an industry that historically treated female musicians as interchangeable frontwomen or confessional accessories. Cole came up in the 1990s, when women could top charts yet still be boxed into narrow narratives: the "angry woman", the "sensitive singer-songwriter", the marketable face attached to someone else's production choices. Her phrasing implies she knows the pipeline problem isn't talent, it's gatekeeping: who gets studio time, radio support, tour budgets, and critical seriousness.

There's a communal "we" here, but it's not naïve solidarity. It's a strategic widening of credit and responsibility - artists, fans, labels, and media all implicated. And the future-facing "to come" reframes legacy away from awards or nostalgia and toward infrastructure: safer rooms, fairer contracts, more women with authority behind the boards. The sentence works because it refuses the triumphalism of "we fixed it" while still insisting the work has momentum - a belief that becomes its own form of pressure on the culture to keep changing.