Quotes About Adversity

And you can't adjust to bastardy?' He said evenly, 'Give me, perhaps, until tomorrow instead of today to achieve it.

Without thinking at all deeply about anything, he was chiefly aware of the need to be back in a company of men, fighting something.

He had survived that. He would survive this.

You don't understand,' she said. In her lap, the loose hands had ground together: between the fair brows a single line showed, of anger and disgust and a kind of futile perplexity. 'You don't understand: how can you? You were born into a household, with parents and wealth; you knew your friends and your enemies; you knew your position in life; whom you were fighting for: whom you were against. I am alone. Every man is my enemy.

What do you want?" He considered. "Amusement, principally. Don't you think it's time my family shared in my misfortunes, as Christians should?

Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.

He was not his own master when he left Russia,' Sybilla said. 'Nor was he his own master when you brought him to France. He is like a river forced into glass and driven from stem to stem of a conjurer's maze without ever reaching the sea.

The sea demands a man who knows the sea and respects it. A man who is prepared to be lonely. There is no isolation like that of the helm in a storm, except the isolation when it is windless.

Because, I think, of something you said. One should be able to face anything. I have learned to play chess again. I have learned to listen to music, and to play it. I have learned to buy self-indulgence and enjoy it. I have learned to take a line of logic and follow it through, whatever the consequences.

Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters.

It was dark, even at noon, with the snow stretching white and stark to the violet slate of the sky. The frost, grown stronger and stronger, was an antagonist to be studied and countered, like a runagate thief with a knife.

He isn't coming,' said Adam. 'Splendid,' said Piero Strozzi heartily. 'I love him, but I have brethren enough who are trying to climb with a foot on my neck.

You promise food and horses and nonresistance and when they invade, you do or don't lick their boots according to the thickness of your walls and the kind of conscience you have.

I don't mind being labelled devilish but I do mind being regarded as unlucky. The only way to answer that is by a string of successes.

I wasn't offering her pity, Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.

If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

She drew herself up to her full height—it was a little difficult on a donkey—and said primly, "I have always found that in painful situations it is a sensible idea to take each hour as it comes and not to anticipate beyond. But oh how I wish I could have a bath!

But a certain perspective is needed about tragedies, Betsy, for they happen to nearly everyone. Eventually you have to learn, try to learn, that it's the eternal things that matter, and among them courage.

The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.

Each evening, after my parents' self-medication, their behavior would change. Some of the time they would be happier and we could get through the evening unscathed. But sometimes it would get ugly.

We are not a problem people, we are people with problems.

I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue.

With five minutes to go, Wimsey watched the first ball of the over come skimming down towards him. It was a beauty. It was jam. He smote it as Saul smote the Philistines. It soared away in a splendid parabola, struck the pavilion roof with a noise like the crack of doom, rattled down the galvanized iron roofing, bounced into the enclosure where the scorers were sitting and broke a bottle of lemonade. The match was won.