Quotes About Adversity

Sooner or later the let-loose sidewalk pups will cross the streets. Running, they will run into each other. And sooner or later, as surely as noses drip downward, it will no longer be enough to merely run. They must run against something. Against each other. It is in their instinct.

Unfortunately, he chose to put Arnold down at the one spot in town as bad as Finsterwald's backyard—namely, Finsterwald's front steps. When Arnold came to and discovered this, he took off like a horsefly from a swatter. As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back. They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read. 6 About an hour later Mrs.

Just cause it doesn't look like you thought it would, doesn't mean that you're not living your dream. from Stargirl

Sometimes life goes its own way and drags you along.

Could life get any worse? She had read that great literature often comes out of great tragedy. If that was true, well, Shakespeare better move over.

Jerry Spinelli

This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad things come, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end-- if there is an end-- everybody's best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one 'what the fuck just happened?' moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die.

There's no deodorant for desperation.

As a vagrant, I was everybody's victim.

Someone jabbed me from behind with a rake. I jumped aside. Someone else pricked me with a sharp prong. Again I sprang away, crying loudly. The crowd became more lively. A stone struck me. I lay down, face to the earth, not wishing to know what might happen next. My head was being bombarded with dried cow dung, moldy potatoes, apple cores, handfuls of dirt, and small stones. I covered my face with my hands and screamed into the dust which covered the road.

Girls who land broken are easy prey.

bind in spite of secrets and

Someone who has come through heartache and maintains wit and charm is far more interesting than someone who has been kept on a pedestal all her life.

I have two options in this world. I can allow what is happening around me to control me, to break me, to destroy me and make me a twisted, angry shell of a person, as it has done to so many others. Or I can rise above it. There is ugliness around me, but there is beauty, too. I will find whatever I seek.

the world is built to eat you alive, but before you go down the gullet, the bastards can't stop you from looking around.

life was a glorious catastrophe.

I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

Jessica Anthony

He] mumbled something about how being a Hungarian meant wanting nothing and being prepared for anything. Or was it the other way around.

There is no time frame that dictates when and how you'll feel what you feel. You just get to deal with hell however, and whenever, it hits you.

No one gets through life unscathed.

Life is not fair, but it is what we have to deal with. And we are going to deal with it so that we can live. No, so that we can thrive.

You can't drown when you know how to float." Chris says nothing for a few minutes. "Maybe. But the water is pretty calm today. There could always be a storm." He rubs my shoulders. He breathes against me. He waits. "It's hard to float in a storm.

Americans can face the world with open arms, Marianne had once said, because the world hasn't yet come to knock it down.