Quotes About Adversity

Tragedy can turn your life around if you're open to it.

Being fired is the pits, ranking right up there with infidelity in its brutalizing effect. The ego recoils and one's self-image is punctured like a tire by a nail. In the weeks since I'd been terminated, I'd gone through all the stages one suffers at the diagnosis of a soon-to-be-fatal disease: anger, denial, bargaining, drunkenness, foul language, head colds, rude hand gestures, anxiety, and eating disorders of sudden onset.

I shrugged, remembering the many swats I'd endured at my Aunt Gin's hands. She always assured me she'd really give me something to cry about if I wanted to protest.

man has two choices. He can quit and wait to die, or he can sing.

Strife is better than loneliness." — Irish proverb

Positive emotions remind us at such times that suffering and uncertainty are not the whole story in any human life. Positive emotions and beliefs fuel resilience and help us bounce back from adversity. They generate even more positive emotions in an upward spiral. This is surely part of the power of love. Love, at its best, brings a cornucopia of good things: joy and contentment, safety and trust, intense interest and involvement, curiosity and openness.

When I tell you all shall be well, I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

T. Ray said 'Who do you think you are? Julias Shakespeare?' The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.

Don't look away. Terrible things will happen now. Unbearable things. Bear it anyway.

I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.

The day life turned into nothing this world could fix

Women who bear the weight of opposition, she wrote, create a shelter for the rest of us.

I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There's a place in you that is inviolate. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.

I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing.

Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness. Say you break your ankle and don't feel it hurting till you've walked another block.

My mauma was shrewd. She didn't get any reading and writing like me. Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.

As writer Isak Dinesen put it, "All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.

No, the mother told her. It's too dangerous there. A small incident, but when multiplied a hundred, a thousand times in a little girl's life, she learns that she's not as capable as a boy of handling life on the edge. She learns to hang back.

All shall be well. I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. I only mean that you will be well in spite of it. There's a place in you that is inviolate. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.

I'm prideful enough to say I didn't complain. After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. I just dived back into the riptide of saving bees.

When I tell you all shall be well, I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.

It's thought we're too weak to face danger and hardship. But do we not give birth? Do we not work day and night? Are we not ordered about and silenced? What are robbers and rainstorms compared to these things?