Quotes About Adversity

Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?

I told her it would likely go on and shed have to survive it. That she'd have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn't able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever.

I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will. I have learned this over and over and over again.

The truest story is always the widest one. It's the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.

But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn't calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If I'd done that, I wouldn't have been here, eighty-some days out

Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

on the PCT, broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn't afford to do it.

Adrienne Rich … did not die a woman who denied that her wounds came from the same source as her power. In fact, she spent her life making power from those wounds [but] Marie Curie… didn't have that luxury — she had to deny that in order to be who she was in her time. But we don't. And I think so much of the work I've done … and the work I hope I continue to do, is about writing into those wounds.

We act as if we don't know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that's changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.

Cheryl Strayed

all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way.

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

Not a single one of us knows what the future holds. The unexpected happens even when we've got everything mapped out.

This is to be expected. It is as it should be. Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us

For some of you, those things have already happened.

I can't fall back, I came too far Hold myself up, and love my scars.

They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us twenty nine to one. They can't get away from us now!

That's part of this world: you learn probably more from the failures than you do from the successes.

We can't turn our backs on this." "I know we can't. It's following us.

Catalogs called it a "survival knife." Survival, in combat, meant knowing how to kill people quickly and silently.

The worst thing that happens is there's an earthquake and we all get sucked into a river of molten lava." "Well …" Ruth said. "That won't hurt much.