Quotes About Adversity

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

There was nothing left to fear. He would endure or he wouldn't.

No matter how canny you think you are, something can come along, bam, and put you on your prat.

what matters isn't whether or not you're frightened, but how you behave.

The ways of the heart are complex." He looked out at the ocean again. "The waves churn and break upon the rocks, Talon. So do human feelings. Passion can be a man's undoing. With passion must come wisdom; otherwise, your enemies have a weapon to use against you.

More men have been defeated by reports than all the steel of all the swords in history." Then

Old enemies must be friends when a greater evil looms.

As my grandmother said, 'Sorry won't unbreak the eggs'. Just clean the mess and move on.

Meet your sorrows head on, and after you've wrestled with them, put them behind.

With bullies it's always the same: whether or not you can best them doesn't matter. What is important is whether or not you'll stand up to them.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.

Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.

Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful efforts keeps us awake.

What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

We don't even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

In the myths, women keep turning into other things because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

breaking through the barriers which life's routine had concreted around the deeper strata of the will, and gradually bringing its unused energies into action." And he spoke of the "stores of bottled up energy and endurance" that people in the earthquake had discovered within themselves.

Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality.

The U.S. Post Office at San Francisco forwarded unstamped mail, often written on scraps and oddments, from the survivors to destinations around the country. ... There were callous and fearful authorities who lashed out, but also institutions such as the post office that just quietly broke the rules to make life a little less disastrous.

It was as though she traveled by a map of the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map. And she never stopped being Cinderella, and told her own story largely as a series of things that happened to her rather than things she did.