How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Somewhere in that precocity and bitterness and somewhere in the illness, whose limits she could not yet define, lay a hidden strength. It was there and working; it had sounded in the glimmer of relief when the fact of the sickness was made plain […]. (3.54)
Dr. Fried shows she has hope that Deborah will get better before Deborah herself shows that hope. Dr. Fried recognizes the glimmer of the "maybe" before Deborah latches onto it—and that may be what Deborah needs to help get her out of her illness.
Quote #2
Esther extracted every particle of hope, going over and over the words, magnifying each positive sign, turning the remarks this way and that for the facets of brightest reflection. (4.5)
Esther's trying to find hope in a letter she's received from the hospital, after Deborah has been there for a month. She sincerely wants Deborah to get better, but she's also looking to spin the information for her family to make the situation appear better than it is.
Quote #3
"She got well and went out and she's working, and we got frightened because we might someday…have to be 'well' and be in the world." (9.82)
Carla tells Deborah why even hearing stories about Doris Rivera, a patient who left D ward for the real world, scares the patients. It gives them hope, but it challenges them to change. And change is hard work.
Quote #4
"It's different here. I been lotsa joints, lotsa wards [...]. What's here…there's more scared, more mad […]—but it's because of the maybe. It's because of the little, little maybe [...]. Everyone was afraid of the hope, the little, little Maybe […]. (13.53)
The other patients in D ward understand the "little maybe" Lucia talks about here. It's the hope of maybe one day getting well and being part of the world. Hope is tricky: it can keep you going, but if, like Deborah, you've been stuck between worlds for a long time and don't know how to interact like a healthy person, hope can be scary. It means you have to give up all you know, and change.
Quote #5
"Can you tell us what we may hope for?"
"If you want to hope for a college diploma and a box of dance invitations and pressed roses and a nice clean-cut young man from a fine family—I don't know. This is what most parents hope for [...]. Part of our work together is to find out and come to terms with what she really does want." (14.2-3)
Jacob asks Dr. Fried what he can hope for in Deborah's recovery, and Dr. Fried responds as Deborah's champion. She knows that Deborah has absorbed what her parents want for her, but she says Deborah will have to figure out her own hopes and dreams for her future.
Quote #6
Deborah appraised her in the light of the myth which she and Carla had made. Doris was very thin and she had graying hair, but even exhausted and dizzy with sedatives, there was an abundant sense of life thrumming through her. In whatever manner she had taken the world for this long, it had not been on her knees. (17.15)
Doris Rivera is a symbol of hope to the patients of D ward because she went out into the world beyond the hospital. When Doris is readmitted, the event squashes the patients' hopes of being successful at the whole real world thing. Deborah, however, also sees the event as evidence that change is a process that allows for setbacks along the way.
Quote #7
"Why couldn't I be the one going?" Deborah had said, "Well, why not?" and she had answered abstractedly, "Maybe…maybe…" as if she were thinking of it for the first time [...]. Helene had been cursing the Maybe and not her at all. (23.39)
Helene, another patient, starts to want to get the point at which she can leave the hospital, and it's because Deborah has inspired her. Helene curses Deborah out for this, because hope is a strange emotion. It can lift you up, but it can also make you fearful, because it can inspire you to change. Change requires action that carries you forward into the unknown, and that's scary for a lot of people.
Quote #8
"Now the choice was to be made again, but this time the scale that weighed the earth's virtues had a new quantity to add to the rest—hope, the little, little Maybe." (25.31)
Deborah weighs whether to give up Yr for Earth or not. She and many other patients struggle with the "Maybe" and its promise of health. They also struggle with the idea that they will have to maintain that health, in spite of all the obstacles in the real world.
Quote #9
She was frightened by the choices that the world offered her. The possible futures stretched out before her like the hall down which she was now walking from the administrative offices: a long road with carefully labeled doors every ten feet of the way—all closed. (28.14)
Faced with the prospect of having to go back to high school in order to be qualified for some kind of job, Deborah starts to feel hopeless about the future. She feels like she will have no opportunities. But her pessimism is short-lived: it turns out that she can get a GED, after all. There's always a way.
Quote #10
She looked again at the faces on the ward. Her presence was making then struggle with Maybes. Suddenly she realized she was a Doris Rivera, a living symbol of hope and failure and the terror they all felt of their own resiliency and hers, reeling punch-drunk from beating after beating, yet, at the secret bell, up again for more. She saw why she could never explain the nature of her failures to these people who so needed to understand it, and why she could never justify scraping together her face and strength to go out again…and again. In some ways reality was as private a kingdom as Yr." (29.99)
Deborah realizes that now she represents to the other patients what Doris had represented to her. She also realizes she won't be able to explain wanting to be a healthy part of the world to the other patients, because they don't want it enough for themselves yet. They'll know it for themselves when they get there.