Quotes About Adversity

Once you learn how to die, you learn how to survive.

How nice would that be today if when a job was lost, a Man of God sat at the dinner table and encouraged you?

Broken open is still open.

And you will be scared again. All your life. You must conquer this. Face them and pretend that aren't there

It's funny. I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes.

He was doing what man does when left with nothing. He was telling himself his own life story.

Sarah watched the man sit alongside other homeless clients. Despite their awful circumstances, they were going on with life, getting through it as best they could.

Quando sei un reietto, ti affezioni anche alle pietre che ti scagliano.

With each new carving, he spoke out loud. He was doing what man does when left with nothing. He was telling himself his own life story.

But the Reb, I'd learned, was like a tough old tree; he bent with the storms but he would not snap.

A military chaplain told me the following story: 'A soldier's little girl, whose father was being moved to a distant post, was sitting at the airport among her family's meager belongings. The girl was sleepy. She leaned against the packs and duffel bags. A lady came by, stopped, and patted her on the head. 'Poor child,' she said. 'You haven't got a home.' The child looked up in surprise. But we do have a home,' she said. 'We just don't have a house to put it in.

A deckhand, a haircutter, and a cook. Really useful out here.

grim reminder of how little the natural world cares for our plans.

People lament that if their loved ones had been born fifty years later, they might have survived what killed them. But perhaps what killed them is what led someone to find a cure.

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so, we turn, among other things, to stories.

If he stayed, it would not be for them--need not be for them--but for himself. And yet each day he did stay. Bored and tense, true, but he stayed. And he discovered thereby how badly he wanted to stay. That the impulse to live was in him stronger than he might have imagined, undiminished by his bleak circumstances.

The maid said no, for she had a sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.

Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.

In quei giorni i funerali erano più semplici e sbrigativi, a causa dei combattimenti. Alcune famiglie non avevano altra scelta che seppellire i propri morti in un cortile o in un punto riparato lungo una strada, essendo impossibile raggiungere un vero cimitero, e di conseguenza sorsero luoghi di sepoltura improvvisati, dove un cadavere ne attirava subito altri, un po' come l'arrivo di un occupante abusivo in un terreno pubblico inutilizzato può dare origine a un'intera baraccopoli.

I'm not strange. I've just been put into circumstances nobody my age should be in.

The victor in the Democratic primary was State Senator Bill Sarpalius, who got a leg up one night in January when a disgruntled patriot slugged him so hard it broke his jaw and the jaw had to be wired shut for most of the campaign. For most politicians, that would constitute an electoral handicap, but since Sarpalius is not bent over double with intellect, it proved a boon. He's a tall, nice-looking, apple-cheeked fellow, and if you don't have to listen to him, he looks good.

We come into the world whole, all of us,but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne.

If you are strong you withstand the storm. Can you see? The storm comes and everything is blurred. But all that is built on a solid foundation has only to stand fast and wait for the storm to pass.