Quotes About Adversity

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

I have had a lot to put up with, she said, looking meaningfully at me. I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.

Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floot is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

But as I try and understand how life works--and why some people cope better than others with adversity--I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream...

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

Gertrude drives on. She says, 'Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it

He had the dog on a lead and he was still managing to be a boy with a dog and the dog was still managing to be a dog with a boy because not even a bomb gets to wipe out everything

Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed [...] but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it. [...] We're [the demons] here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox.

What you are pursuing is meaning -- a meaningful life. There's the hap -- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whichever metaphor you want to use -- that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

I have ridden out all the storms," said Shakespeare, "even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

Stories are where I live - they are physical three-dimensional places to me. When I was a kid and locked in the coal hole for various crimes, I had a choice: count coal - a limited activity. Tell myself a story - an unlimited world of the imagination.

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.

So much good my persecutors have done me by recklessly pouring out all the shafts of their hatred. They have deprived themselves of any power over me and henceforward I can laugh at them. It

L'adversité sans doute est un grand maître, mais il fait payer cher ses leçons, et souvent le profit qu'on en retire ne vaut pas le prix qu'elles ont coûté.

Haç kartal? kovunca, Romal?lara özgü o gözü peklik de yitip gitti.