Quotes About Adversity

As Davy said, so it happened. The ironworkers started to work in the pit for not much more than some of the boys. Some of them even started pulling the trams in place of the ponies. A lot of the older and better-paid men got discharged without being told why, although it was put out that they were too old and could not work as well as they ought. But that was nonsense, because Dai Griffiths, one of them, was one of the best in the Valley and known for it.

The foraging for food and water, the struggle for life in a world without masters, housed in a body that man had made dependent on himself.

Time had lost its multidimensional scope. There was only the present for Robert Neville; a present based on dayto-day survival, marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair. I am predominantly vegetable, he often thought to himself. That was the way he wanted it

This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.

This is her freedom. This one. The freedom to be equal to the terrors of the day.

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

A woman of her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can't use her? we're down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she's going to roll over and die?

pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had

Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight.

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils.

A good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.

The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end. Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated. That is the difference between the Germans and the Japanese. That is what we are up against in fighting Japan.

His problem, his son believed, was "too many irons in the fire": a nice cliché for an industrialist and inventor who worked with kilns. "One by one, his inventions fell into other hands, some by fair sale, but most of them by piracy, when it became known that he had nothing left wherewith to maintain his rights. In short, with seven children to provide for, he found himself a ruined man."12

a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I've had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I've lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It's in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.

It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences—all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey.

Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. Success is just the opposite. Communities and commitment can form around suffering much more than around how wonderful or superior we are.

It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.

It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In

Anne herself was no stranger to adversity, but she had always hated any situation that could only be endured. She was able to summon the necessary courage for a bold, confident stroke, but simply getting by left her dispirited, and it seemed that the older she got, the more frequent these situations became.

Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn't. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don't, they'll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.