Quotes About Adversity

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology.

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was. (Enoch Root observes six-year-old Isaac Newton)

That time in Seattle—during the lawsuit—was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. I been holed up in this place long enough.

AMONGOL, KNOCKED INTO a cook fire during the initial surge of horsemen, had lived long enough to run—shirt and hair on fire—into the rows of tents. Rutger assumed he had died from the burns, but before he had expired, the flames had leaped from him to several tents. The fire was spreading, and a haze of ash and embers was starting to fill the air. A storm of glittering snow.

One of the soldiers slapped Gansukh on the legs with the shaft of his spear, and the Mongol warrior rolled away from the blow, getting his legs under him. Even though Gansukh didn't understand a word of what was being said, the message was clear. Clenching his teeth, Gansukh wobbled to his feet, and as he stood upright, one of the other soldiers whacked him across the back, causing him to stumble and nearly fall.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way.

It's like putting on crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies.

For the most part they were oddly cheerful. Beyond a certain point it was all just kicking through wreckage.

Doesn't matter. Seeing her, talking to her, makes you feel bad. And at some level, your brain wants the thing that makes you feel bad to go away. Simplest reaction in the world. Doesn't make you a bad person. Doesn't mean you have to give in to it.

Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell.

if you found yourself on the wrong side of that exponential equation, you were completely screwed.

Defeating the Nazis was in the same category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that.

Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed.

He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year

Daniel got dressed. Much of his clothing had been blown up.

If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away

Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.

Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner. Dr. Mahmoud leans in. Life is managed.

in my life is all in my brain, really, so it would be natural that when my brain was screwed up, everything in my life would be.

If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

Sometimes I just think depression's one way of coping with the world.

Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner." Dr. Mahmoud leans in. "Life is managed.

And what is that nightmare, Craig? Life Life is a nightmare Yes