Quotes About Adversity

had forged her myself, out of brokenness, learning to love wildness instead of fearing it. To thrive on the exhilaration of the hunt, charging headlong into the world even—or especially—when it hurt to do it.

it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.

Those things are as real as anything else, though, and I'll have to fly through them. Straight through the sickening dips and air pockets, because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't.

because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't. Sometimes I've thought it's only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too—a

I would show her I wasn't a bit of cobweb in the corner, something to be wiped or straightened, but a rival worth her notice. I would learn her ways and habits, and track her closely until I knew what she was and how to best her, and what precisely it would take to steal my good life back.

A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.

Long ago Corolla told me that it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.

what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it. I'm starting to understand the difference, and how maybe the only way we can survive what's here, and what we are, is together.

I was thinking about how I had struggled and strained for years, as Karen had, and toward things that were disastrous for me. And maybe that was unavoidable. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me. And it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it.

How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.

that came when you knew that if life didn't go exactly

And men always seem to have a more difficult time compartmentalizing at these times than women, I've found. Women are stronger because they have to be.

My mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.

Satans balls

If you want to know real joy in life, then be willing to let pain tutor your soul.

It's alot harder than you'd think to scar a kid for life.

The Captain's hand went to his forehead. A dreadful loss of status in the world. In his world. Loss of reputation and the regard of our fellow persons is in any society, from Iceland to East Indies, a terrible blow to the spirit.

An Gorta Mor, she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.

Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.

His future was all there like a three-draw spyglass shut up and compact and he would draw it out cylinder by cylinder. Behind him were the flames of a burning barn in Kentucky and a childhood of bastardy. The worst was knowing all the time he was a good fiddler, even a superb fiddler, but long before this time and surely now many a good man had gone down to ruin or death unrecognized and probably drunk into the bargain.

as they drifted they had gathered trouble and a great deal of peculiar knowledge about human beings, what human beings would do or say under extreme duress. It was not something you could do anything with but it interested them all the same.

If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, 'I survived!

Don't get mad, get smart

In January 1973, Murray lost Barlow to cancer. By September, she had resigned from Brandeis University and entered the General Theological Seminary. The year after she earned her Master of Divinity degree, she became the first African-American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.