Quotes About Adversity

Look at the pebbles in the bottom of the pool, Miss Emily, so round and smooth and shining. Yes, but where did they get that beautiful polish, that satin skin, that lovely shape, Rebecca? Not in the still pool lying on the sands. It was never there that their angles were rubbed off and their rough surfaces polished, but in the strife and warfare of running waters. They have jostled against other pebbles, dashed against sharp rocks, and now we look at them and call them beautiful.

Never let it be said that I could not talk my way out of any trouble that I could not punch.

I have been bitten by the snake too

It is not in victory that you learn how strong you truly are.

Had she been broken and healed all awry, like a bone that had not been properly set?

You are made who you are by the bad stuff, the little things, as much as the great triumphs and big decisions.

Stay down, Stubby, or you'll get your head shot off," Conroy warned me. He didn't have to tell me. Seeing as how I was fond of my head, I lay low when the bullets flew.

The human sprit can withstand much, but once broken, it crumbles like dust

Courage is a fair-weather friend.

And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

It was a matter of making the best job you can . . . and accepting your fate.

I think heroes and heroines are both vulgar and boring and usually lead that kind of lives. But when you tell people you were just doing your own thing in an admittedly escalated situation, they say, Ah, yes, etc.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

The thing about life is that you must survive. Life is going to be difficult, and dreadful things will happen. What you do is move along, get on with it, and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but being tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated.

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.

Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go.

In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates

life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough

Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

Among the men, only Whit kept his face clean-shaven; how he did it in the absence of privacy and clean water, I'll never know. I also knew that our major kept up a strong front during the day, his cheer unflagging, but wept uncontrollably while asleep in his funkhole.

No one survives the future

Five years later those fellows were all gone, their capital vanished like so much cigar smoke, while I churned out the only commodities that still held their value: courage, poise, humor, and hope.

The last poem I wrote before they sent me in was called "Blackout;" it went like this: When life seems gray And short of fizz It seems that way Because it is.

In every book she'd ever read, the heroine was subject to self-doubt and unjust criticism. And in every case, it only served to harden their resolve.