Quotes About Adversity

Quand on ne trouve pas la solution à son malheur, on lui cherche un coupable.

I accept that I've lost the game of life in the same way that one loses at solitaire.

This is no world for gentle people

The course of one's life is a difficult thing. -from Diary of My Sixteenth Year

Por qué florecía aquel loto en medio de una hoguera? ¿Por qué no se marchitaba?

And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.

To live is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time. And to complete the harbor long after the ship was drowned.

Use every trial that comes to you as an opportunity to improve yourself.

You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.

It ain't the heat, it's the humility.

Things don't like me. Furniture purposely sticks out its leg for me. A polished corner once literally bit me. My blanket and I have always had a complicated relationship.

Things don't like me. Furniture purposely sticks out its leg for me. A polished corner once literally bit me. My blanket and I have always had a complicated relationship. Soup served to me never cools. Any little thing—a coin or a cuff link—that falls off the table usually rolls away under furniture that's hard to move. I crawl across the floor and lifting my head I see the sideboard laughing.)

People aren't poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they're poor.

You are never stronger, thought Samad as approached the doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.

There are so many different ways to be poor

When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.

I couldn't afford to be offended.

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe.

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor.

He wanted to be in the world and take what came with it, endings local and universal, full stops, periods, looks of injured disappointment and the everyday war. He liked the everyday war. He was taking that with fries. To go.

If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.

Everything can be taken from you in a second, but the human spirit is so strong. War can teach you so much about evil, and so much about good.