Quotes About Adversity

Post career-threatening injury, you must fight not only your body, but your mind as well.

In 'Poster Boys,' I played a character that no one would have thought that I could portray. The film helped me focus on work, and I worked so hard on it that even though it didn't do well, I didn't let it bring me down.

I've always wanted to make a poster out of my bad reviews and frame it.

I didn't ask anyone to make me a poster boy, because poster boys always end up on dart boards.

My great, great grandfather, Michael O'Hanson, fled the impending potato famine of Ireland and arrived in America in the early 1840s with his bride, Bridget. They headed for Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and a mecca for Irish-Catholic immigrants then.

I worked in rose fields, and I worked in potato fields. I did some bouncing.

Even that was all consumed after two days, and the patients had to try to choke down fresh fish, just boiled in water, without salt, pepper or butter; mutton, beef, and potatoes without the faintest seasoning.

My father, who was a hair colourist, died when I was young, so my mother had to work very hard. But at the same time, I do believe that if you have everything, it is easy to make a dinner. When you only have flour and water and olives and potatoes, you have to be much more creative, and that's what my mother is all about.

Without exposure to potential failure, there is no risk.

America has faced much more difficult times, including potential national extinction, without flinching.

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.

When the present gets tough, you have to battle through it by imagining an outcome that is weeks, potentially even months, ahead.

Mondays are the potholes in the road of life.

I would miss months of school and then return with bright blond hair. Needless to say, there was bullying. I wasn't beaten up daily, but there was name-calling and jealousy. You have to bear in mind that 'Harry Potter' wasn't cool. I wasn't part of the 'Terminator' franchise.

I never back down from a challenge and when I learned that a single drop of Krazy Glue was strong enough to hold up to 1,000 pounds, I knew I had to put the product's strength to the test for myself.

I mean, to be honest with you, my whole career I've guarded players that have outweighed me by 30 pounds. Period, 'Melo to LeBron.

I'm not going to go run and hide because I'm catching some heat. I'm not going to stay at home and pout.

Nothing prompts creativity like poverty, a feeling of hopelessness, and a bit of panic.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

I know what poverty is.

Poverty is the schoolmaster of character.

I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.

In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness - of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.

Music has empowered me through poverty, abuse, and mental-health issues.