Quotes About Adversity

Whatever hand life has dealt you, seeing it positively will always make it a winning one!

The world is full of victims; don't add to the growing culture of "I've a story to tell", well not unless it's a story to help others overcome situations or as a warning.

Your life depends entirely on your reactions to the accountability that you are faced with.

I must have had that Bugsy Malone type of face that attracts every fucker to have a go at me.

Most people with new ideas are ridiculed … until they succeed!

I was so incensed that I was oblivious to all as I ran over broken glass, holding a five-foot weightlifting bar. The glass tore the soles of my feet as I chased the gang's car up the street. I remember breathing heavily as I cursed failing to catch my enemies.

The sea was washing me crosswise and the speed of my strokes pushed me forward, but at a slower pace than the sideways wash. The float that I had tied around my chest was more of a hindrance as it was caught in the tide and floated sideways on the current, it should have been strung out behind me as I swam onwards. This extra effort was making huge demands on my oxygen requirement, I breathed harder and had to avoid intakes of seawater.

I know people have swum the 3.5 mile stretch of the Solent from the Isle of Wight to the mainland for charity, and some just for the hell of it in the Cross Solent Swim, but this was at night, in the dark and without the help of a nearby boat to haul me in to safety. I didn't have the benefit of tidal maps, accompanied swimming mates in near perfect conditions or the likes. I only my strength of determination and the beckoning lights on the mainland to aim for.

Sometimes a choppy wave would swamp me, and after I rose gasping I would vomit the foul-tasting water, wiping the sea from my eyes and nostrils. Then I regained my posture to do battle, again with the Solent.

Although I was in the cold water and my teeth were chattering, I could feel perspiration running down my forehead as visions of failure swan around in my head. Although I was not the first, I felt that I was the first and would celebrate when I'd accomplished my goal. My focus was on reaching the other side of the Solent.

Wherever we find monsters, there, too, we also find heroes.

Of course, often enough, the people in books are poor. But then they're so darn poor, it's crazy. And, often enough, just when everything's at its worst, some handy little legacy comes along and the new life opens out before them right away, like a great big tulip. Well, I only had one legacy in my life and I know what I did with that. It darn near ruined me.

If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.

Life was a storm to wander through.

My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus." [ The Science of Second-Guessing ( New York Times Magazine Interview , December 12, 2004)]

It does not so matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: Get the Habit of Being Ready , October 20, 1917

We are told that "There is no great loss without some small gain.' Even so I think that there is no great gain without a little loss. Laura Ingalls Wilder, So We Moved the Spring

to the icy roads and the pockets of resistance which

Fall down again, Bella?' No, Emmett, I punched a werewolf in the face.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the game. —Randy Pausch

Nothing I can do. We lost the outriggers. I need the wheels free to engage the crankshaft.

Sei-Hoe Hon and I am the