Quotes About Adversity

When I'm in a ring, I'm there to hurt you. That's the objective in a fight. Your wellbeing is not my concern.

I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

Anyone is free to judge me, but they weren't there in my tough times.

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

I don't know about Mario Balotelli saying, 'Why always me?' - England should be saying as a nation, 'Why always us?' You can go back to 1970, when Gordon Banks got food poisoning and we lost to West Germany. Then there was 1986 and Maradona's hand. And last time, Frank Lampard not getting his goal against the Germans.

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.

I was born and raised in Liberia in West Africa. My mother is Sierra Leonean, and my father's Liberian. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of civil unrest in both countries, so when something would happen in Liberia, we'd go to Sierra Leone, and when something would happen in Sierra Leone, we'd go back to Liberia. We moved to save our lives.

It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.

I wish that only three residents of Tel Aviv could see what conditions on the West Bank are like. Living in such proximity, most Israelis have no idea about the adversity on the West Bank.

A lot of people - they might think I fell off, but they don't know I'm eating. I'm on the West coast, eating. It's just they don't hear about me because they don't see me on the TV. But I'm still around.

You can always say that it was scarce dollars when Lewis and Clark wanted to go to the West Coast and explore the West. And people complained about it, I understand, from a reading of the history books.

I went to several different grade schools all over the West Coast. I got polio when I was 8 and spent eight months in the hospital and a rehab clinic in Seattle.

There have been so many stories out there about me, so many untruths. I've always believed you can only control what you can control. I can control my attitude, my effort, my commitment to West Virginia. I can't control lies.

Well, pioneers always suffer. I don't care who is the first to embark upon things. For instance, settlers that settled the West, Western Canada and the U.S... they went though hell doing it, but it had to be done.

At the age of 14, I ran away from home for four days and hitchhiked around western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio.

My parents separated soon after I was born, so I left Helsinki when I was a year old. My mother took me to Paris and then other places throughout Western Europe.

When you label so much of what happens to you as 'bad,' it reinforces the feeling that you are a powerless pawn at the mercy of outside forces over which you have no control. And - this is key - labeling something a bad thing almost guarantees that you'll experience it as such.

I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.

You don't have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn't know you possessed.

Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers.

Every movie goes through that U-shape where you start with 'Oh that's a great idea. I love it.' Everything's possible and then you face 'Oh, we can't do that, and that's impossible, and that's a bad choice.' You go the practicality of it. And then you come up to 'Great.' But that middle part is when you don't have results yet.

I just feel like I influence people because I'm like - I was practically homeless.

I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.