Quotes About Adversity

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.

I was so depressed I stopped using hair spray for three weeks.

What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.

Whatever it is, you can live through it, and it ends.

I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down.

It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light

Man against Nature...Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

Life proceeds, it enrages.

Crisis is opportunity.

OxyContin, God's gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself.

Brain of a deer tick, but that's not something to hold against a running back.

The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that's just the deal.

We drove around with "Proud Tobacco Farmer" stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

So that was me promising Emmy that life is to be trusted. I knew better. I should have let her go with her gut: Never get back on the horse, because it's going to throw you every damn chance it gets. Then maybe she'd have been wise to the shit that came for her later on, and maybe it would have turned out better.

Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that has scant use for mules.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes

The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures.

There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that's on you.

Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you're on your own with your ghosts. You're the ship and they're the bottle.

This is all going to scare us to death," she said. "You and me. But we're still going to have to do it.

When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

As to the career of avoiding making enemies. You can't dig any burrow deep enough. Might as well stand and look them in the eye.

it's not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are.

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. —WALLACE STEVENS, "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard