Quotes About Adversity

I spent 39 days in the Amazon, and I could not even find a fish to catch.

Unless people die from it, a little diarrhea isn't going to stop us from having our live fish.

I didn't have the same fitness or ability as the other girls, so I had to beat them with my mind.

I think that fitness really kind of saved me and made me the person that I am today, through losing my dad and everything that I've had to deal with.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

She was very kind to us when Joe and I went through the darkest days of the leak of my name in 2003. And, of course, Joe worked in the Clinton White House.

Numerous candidates lose their first White House race and try again four years later - but all of them do so after running surprisingly well the first time. No one ever talked about John Connally or Phil Gramm running again.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

I grew up around whites, I grew up around Jews, I grew up around blacks, I grew up around Hispanics. We moved a lot.

In the land of the skunks, he who has half a nose is king.

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.

There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

What I am very, very moved and struck by is that so many people in the world are often living a life that they hadn't planned for themselves. And they wake up one day and say, 'Hang on. Who am I? Is this really me? Is this what I really wanted?' And also, 'Can I change it? Have I got the courage to change it?'

Losing my hearing was always my biggest fear, so what's the worst that can happen, sing the wrong notes? Who cares, it's not going to kill you.

When I get hate mail, I get really down on myself, and I read it to my mom, and my mom is like, 'So what? Who cares? These people don't know you, so you can't take the praise or the hate to heart.'

As for kids who are struggling personally, ignore the bullies! Who cares what they think? A lot of the time, they're not thinking, so you shouldn't take their words to heart. Ignore, ignore, ignore, and keep pushing forward.

When kids run up to me and ask, 'What happened?' I just lean over and whisper, 'Cigarettes.' And once I was in a car and this girl at traffic lights was giving me the eye. She could only see my head, so I decided to do a 360 in the car seat to freak her out. Her face was like, 'Whoa, what is going on?' She sped off really quickly.

A black woman's handbook in this industry is, 'Whoa.' The chapter on 'Don't go there.' The chapter on 'How to say that nicely,' how to express that you don't like something so that you don't lose the opportunity - which is what we're doing all day long.

It's really crazy looking back on my bullies or whoever was trying to torment me or tease me, because karma is just, like, crazy.

My job is to fight whoever they put in front of me.

With tech companies, whoever's the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, 'Is this the end of them?' And - there's more - more times people think that's the case than it really is the case.

I do what I've got to do to survive, to keep my teeth in my head, and my head on my shoulders. I apologize to whoever can't put that together and understand that.