Quotes About Adversity

So many things that happen to you are so dreadful, it's important to have a sense of humour.

I have a good sense of humour, and that's what kept me for the 30 years I was locked up.

The thing that got me over the hump was accepting that I had to do whatever I could to stay in the game.

There were times when I had maybe a couple of hundred dollars, and times I made myself think I was on top of the world.

Falling down doesn't matter, even if you do it a hundred times. All that matters is that you get up again.

We've all seen that every challenge we've gone through, we've learned something from. It's not getting hung up on the challenges but figuring out how to get ahead.

Hunger can bring out the worst in us.

I left home because I was hungry.

I experienced firsthand what it means to be poor, what it means to go hungry, and that, I think, may be the reason, the root cause of why I'm able to work so hard, even these days.

the men were offered extra supplies of pemmican, a gumlike mixture of animal fat and protein. At its best, it tasted like salt-pork chewing gum. At its worst, it was like rancid whale blubber.

He complained to his superiors at 'being shot at from behind hedges by men in trilbys and mackintoshes and not allowed to shoot back'. But those men in trilbys taught him a lesson he would never forget: irregular soldiers, armed with nothing but homespun weaponry, could wreak havoc on a regular army.

You are like Odysseus, who could go out onto the great sea, lose all his goods and his friends, come to the boundaries of death, and return still himself.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body - a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. (2)

But I was born bent out of shape. I could picture myself coming out of the womb crooked and wrong. It never takes much for me to lose patience. The phrase fuck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it's near. Midtongue.

Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails.

Smile, it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.

There were a lot of people who deserved a lesson, deserved to really understand, that nothing came easy, that most things were going to go sour.

Things might not be great, but things would be okay.

My demons aren't remotely tackled, they're just mildly concussed.

Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that's why someone had invented a saying like that. So we'd all know that we'd never have what we needed.

I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there—hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body—a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out.

All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind.

Maybe I'd grow a garden of weeds.