Quotes About Adversity

First rule of life, Idina. Everybody screws up. What matters is whether we let that stop us in our tracks or we tell it to fuck off so we can get back on our feet and keep going.

Today is a part of a long journey and this isn't the last chapter. It's just one of those middle ones that takes some courage to walk through to see what comes next.

That's how we learn, ain't it? Accidents 'n mistakes 'n it's all worth knowledge s'long as we keep from grinding ourselves down in the gutter over it.

I think the general opinion is that it's one thing to be strong and go after something and fight to help others when you're in control. Anyone can make themselves look good if they work hard enough at it. But it's the moments that take all that control away completely when you find out who a person is. How they react to not having a say in the matter.

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the "battle" around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them.

The latrine broke my lion heart.

The only aspect of our travels that is interesting to others is disaster.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Mortal love is but the licking of honey from thorns…" There was laughter again then, and applause, and a cry, "Well sung!

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty. —ELIE WIESEL

By tricky I meant I was getting an average of an 85 percent chance of failure and death, and it was only that low because my last diagnostic said my risk assessment module was wonky. (I know, that explains a lot about me.)

Pretending bad things aren't happening is not a great survival strategy.

Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.

I said: "Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on." They all stopped talking and stared at me.

Expecting it and having it happen were two different things, something I learned the first time I got shot to pieces.

Mother bared her fangs. "Stop being overdramatic." Kai would have loved to, if dramatic things would stop happening to him.

Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.

In the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. It's imposed from the outside. So it's possible to fight it. You should do the things you're afraid of.

In the bot-fighting business, small mistakes like that get you torn apart.

And it also told me I was going to need to go old school to break this fucker.

I didn't stop in my tracks because I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things no matter how much they shock or horrify me.

I'm not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I've been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I've been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

But the fact remained that a tense situation just made McKay think faster. You could probably phrase it as an equation, where the increasing awfulness of whatever tight spot they were in was directly proportional to the speed of McKay's ability to think a way out of it.