Quotes About Adversity

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose.

Pain is what yields the solution.

On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as hell.

Real change, though, is forgiving enough to take a little failure, strong enough to take despair in small doses.

And yet I sensed that I had not just been pummeled by death but reshaped by it, poised now at some crucial junction between darkness and endurance, which is the realist's version of hope.

It was a raw country, and the first generations of colonial women did things that their granddaughters would have found unthinkable.

Just like the breakthroughs, the bad stuff always takes you by surprise. (121)

A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you.

How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase 'make us grow' slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

I try to cope with everything through humor.

No one likes to lose. It is how you handle the loss that reveals your character.

The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.

No two people can possibly coordinate all their developmental crises.

Resolving the issues of one passage does not insulate us forever. There will be other tricky channels ahead, and we learn by moving through them. If we pretend the crises of development don't exist, not only will they rise up later and hit with a greater wallop but in the meantime we don't grow.

haven't been able

In the end, it doesn't matter what words are said or unsaid. . . .Life's mistakes are made whether you can see them or not. What counts is how we learn to live with them.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.

I hadn't planned on climbing mountains. But now that you're in the mountains, be ready to suffer.

En este amor no entré por desvarío, ni lo traté, como otros, con engaños, ni fue por elección de mi albedrío: desde mis tiernos y primeros años a aquella parte m'enclinó mi estrella y aquel fiero destino de mis daños.

They say golf is like life, but don't believe them. Golf is more complicated than that.

Chris reflected that a horrific place like this, with all the odds so grotesquely stacked against him, was where the Doctor magnificently belonged.