Quotes About Adversity

This is what Liza knows: People go under. They fall off the world, they go beneath and drown and die. Sometimes nothing saves you. But fuck it, she's still here. She is a living thing, with twelve pins now pressed into the tree-house oak in the backyard and a thirteenth coming

Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space." As she spoke, her tone shifted. She wasn't talking about me anymore. "You can't go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car. You gotta plant more zinnias.

The things that happen to me just make me more me.

she hadn't known that no one grew up without collecting dings and broken edges.

All of us, every innocent babe born on this planet, gets broken eventually.

You go to bed, too, and don't fret, hear me? Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.' As she spoke, her tone shifted. She wasn't talking about me anymore. 'You can't go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car.

Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.

At least in America, you lose your house, you can get it back from the bank. In Israel, you lose it to the rockets.

After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy.

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better—that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

Looking up from the blank page to the blinking clock, he discovered it was only three-fifteen. He decided that today was perhaps the longest day of his life. Not only had he been called an idiot to his face, but he could do nothing to counter that opinion, because

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

Challenges are what makes life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

And the fact that heroism occurred alongside negative behaviors, that it flourished in spite of base human nature, makes it all the more affecting and powerful.

What makes most of us who we are most of all is...how we respond to what happens to us.

for what is a man in a storm like this?

But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?

I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.

When Lincoln was thirty-two, he wrote, "I am now the most miserable man living.

people often said that Lincoln had two distinct moods. But those who knew him well saw, as Ficklin did, that he "was naturally despondent and sad." It's not that his moods turned in a cycle, as day gives way to night, but that he lived in the night and made a strong effort to bring the sun in. "Gloom and sadness were his predominant state," said Herndon.

in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

The suffering he had endured lent him clarity, discipline, and faith in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times.

He concluded his speech by citing an old parable, of an Eastern monarch who charged his wise men to invent a sentence that would apply to all times and in all situations. The wise men returned with "And this too shall pass away.

Perhaps," observes James McPherson, "McClellan's career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility." Lincoln had clearly learned those lessons.