Quotes About Challenge

If fight or flight is the choice, it's way easier to fly.

First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me.

People had to manage terrible truths.

The day comes, they hand you a new rule book.

the tall weed gets cut.

She stuck with a different theory: I needed to be more pushy with them. Did she give up on her dreams? No, she worked hard for what she wanted. Did I expect anybody to look out for Damon if he wouldn't look out for himself? Life is what you make it! Here's where Miss Barks didn't grow up: foster care. She had no clue how people can be living right on the edge of what's doable. If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff.

The devil here is a boy with too much imagination," he usually said.

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's

You could probably think of a hundred little things that would have made this turn out different. But you'd be wrong. A life like your sister's isn't some little pony you can turn around any way you want. It's a train. Once it gets going it's heavier than heaven and hell put together and it runs on its own track.

I told Dr. Andresen I was going for it, and she did the rare thing of smiling with her whole mouth. I think you are unlikely to obliterate, she said. And I said, You watch. (a conversation with his therapist)

marched uphill to meet her demise.

For some, a lousy day's work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it's live or die.

Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else.

If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it's easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you've ended up someplace you're proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.

Loser is a cliff. Once you've gone over, you're over.

You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

I'm hurt, okay, but in this game, pain is not the enemy. Failure is your enemy. Being too slow, missing an opening, miscalculating a pass, these things you control. Doing it right is your only friend, messing up is your foe, and the distance between them is all you are here to care about. The rest is landscape. Pain is the turf under your cleats. Pain is weather.

today's problems can't be solved by today's people, we just keep shoring up our bankruptcy with the only tools we know. Making up more and more complicated stories about how we haven't failed.

When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can't even see what you're believing in.

Willa's lifelong service to the duty of proper order now seemed like an idiot's game.

The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody