Quotes About Adversity

Horatio Lyle hit the floor, the floor hit him, and the floor came out the winner. It was in times like these, he told himself, when Newton's Second Law really made its point.

Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That's the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.

You will live as you live in any world...With difficulty, and grief.

The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.

The war is always going badly.

Let me tell you something, kid," said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.

In addition to all the other kinds of magic there is Yes Magic and No Magic, and Mallow is wonderful fierce at No Magic. Sometimes that is the last magic you can hold on to, when all the rest has gone.

I have survived, but I have not been spared.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you'll learn all about when you're older and don't care anymore.

There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.

I'm not afraid of you!' The wombat yelled. 'I saw you get stuck in the washing machine once. Round and round you went! Who's afraid of something that can't defeat a rinse cycle?

Bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to okay people. Bad things happen to everyone.

Time is no one's friend--time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.

W]hat is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

I've come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime and if you spend it too soon, you're all out of fuck it all to hell by the time you really need it.

She wasn't angry. You can't get angry just because the world's so much bigger than you and you're stuck in it.

I savor bitterness — it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.

We spent a century closed up within four walls and a roof. We are claustrophobic. We prefer the sun and the wind and the sea though it bites some of us who are made of metal, and tears papery hearts.

Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.

It's like Great-Aunt Goguenar's Sixth Unkillable Fact: 'Everything just gets so fucked up sometimes and the natural resting state of reality is not to make any goddamned sense if it can help it and you've just got to accept that because it's not going to get any better from here on in.'

Snow White swallows that like a sword. She lets the hammer click back into place. Everything in her that's not nailed down is shaking loose.

You will live as you live in any world,' Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya's, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya's hand were in hers. 'With difficulty, and grief.