"There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round"
About this Quote
Auster’s line sounds like a fortune-cookie affirmation until you notice the slight grit in its gears. “There’s hope for everyone” isn’t just an ethical claim; it’s a narrative engine. In Auster’s universe, hope is less a sunny mood than a stubborn mechanism that keeps people moving through chance, loss, and the weird cruelty of coincidence. The second sentence tightens the screw: “That’s what makes the world go round.” Hope becomes infrastructure, not inspiration - a kind of psychological gravity that keeps strangers getting on buses, taking calls, opening letters, falling in love with the wrong person anyway.
The intent feels double: to console and to indict. If hope is what powers the world, then the world runs on a fragile fuel - easily exploited, easily mistaken for meaning. Auster’s fiction is full of characters who survive on the possibility that the next encounter will explain the last one, that patterns will reveal themselves, that the universe is secretly coherent. He’s not mocking them, exactly. He’s registering how human beings turn uncertainty into motion.
Context matters: postwar, postmodern Auster inherits a century that broke big promises and still couldn’t kill the appetite for them. The line works because it refuses grand metaphysics. No talk of destiny, progress, or virtue. Just “hope,” democratized and a little impersonal, as if it’s distributed randomly, like weather. It’s a compact thesis for Auster’s recurring subject: we don’t move through life because we know; we move because we can’t stop wanting a different ending.
The intent feels double: to console and to indict. If hope is what powers the world, then the world runs on a fragile fuel - easily exploited, easily mistaken for meaning. Auster’s fiction is full of characters who survive on the possibility that the next encounter will explain the last one, that patterns will reveal themselves, that the universe is secretly coherent. He’s not mocking them, exactly. He’s registering how human beings turn uncertainty into motion.
Context matters: postwar, postmodern Auster inherits a century that broke big promises and still couldn’t kill the appetite for them. The line works because it refuses grand metaphysics. No talk of destiny, progress, or virtue. Just “hope,” democratized and a little impersonal, as if it’s distributed randomly, like weather. It’s a compact thesis for Auster’s recurring subject: we don’t move through life because we know; we move because we can’t stop wanting a different ending.
Quote Details
| Topic | Hope |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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