Quotes About Adversity

Nos aferramos el uno al otro como supervivientes de un naufragio, asombrados de que ninguno de los dos se haya ahogado.

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything. And

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced...So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything.

Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story by Andrea Warren; Children of the Orphan Trains, 1854–1929 by Holly Littlefield; and Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains edited by J. Sanford Rikoon (which

Christina Baker Kline

I count a hundred steps and start again. My da used to say it's good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure. He said this when we were in the throes of sickness on the Agnes Pauline, and again in the bitter first winter in New York, when four of us, including Mam, came down with pneumonia. Test your limits. Learn what you can endure. I am doing that.

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she's come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.

No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn't given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I'd lost.

Christina Baker Kline

The smallest things get to her. It's as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn't -- which, of course, is pretty often -- she is surprised and affronted.

as a week. She's been spanked with a spatula, slapped across

It was worse for Mam, who discovered on the boat she was again with child and could hardly keep any food down. But even with all of this, as I stood on the lower deck outside our dark, cramped rooms in steerage, watching the oily water churn beneath the Agnes Pauline, I felt my spirits lift. Surely, I thought, we would find a place for ourselves in America.

The night of the fire, the night they took me in, I could hear Mrs. Schatzman in her bedroom, fretting with her husband about what to do with me. "I didn't ask for this," she hissed, the words as distinct to my ears as if she'd been in the same room. "Those Irish! Too many children in too small a space. The only surprise is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more.

Test your limits. Learn what you can endure. I am doing that. As

I could either wait it out or pack my bags, but I could't force a confrontation with a man who refused to be confronted. So I did what a lot of women do: I kept my head in the sand. And I waited for winter to be over.

you can be pinpricked to death,' said Marta. 'I think the Chinese have a torture along those lines.

If you cannot see the bright side of life, polish the dull side.

If ye canna see the bright side o' life, polish the dull side

As long as we can tell stories about our ability to survive, the more we will hope, not self-destruct.

Oh that it were with me As with the flower; Blooming on its own tree For butterfly and bee Its summer morns: That I might bloom mine hour A rose in spite of thorns.

Sam faced something he had never conceived of in all his life—the triumph of calumny.

There were torments in the Himalayas, windspouts in the Grand Canyon, and Judges of the Supreme Court got into sacred rages. What could little boys do, too, about differences between their hearthstones, Mother and Father?

she said, her children should not live on trash, her children had to fight for their livings, having such a silly, puffed-up ignoramus of a father, her girls were not going to be underfed "mud rats.

it was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.