Quotes About Adversity

When I was up she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. "Remember how good you feel now," she said. "There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don't want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won't last forever. Capture the good moments," she said.

MAMA Well, little boys' hides ain't as tough as Southside roaches. You better get over there behind the bureau. I seen one marching out of there like Napoleon yesterday.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, There you go. -- Willing

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?

At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet.

The trick to flying safely, Zoe always said, was to never buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...

You live if you dance to the voice that ails you.

But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush. Still

It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.

Life is 10 percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.

Adversity is another way to measure the greatness of individuals. I never had a crisis that didn't make me stronger.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it

He became, in that instant, pure topography: his belly a highland, tapering down to a head-hamlet, with two hard-blinking eye-ponds. Four servants rushed to his aid. He waved them off with a smile. Made

After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

no one is more truly themselves than when they are sick or injured. That's when the qualities come out.

for the bird that cannot soar, God has provided low branches.

He was like one of those saprophytic orchids that can create harmony and wonder even as it grows and blossoms on a pile of shit, in a place of skulls and bones. He let his rifle rust, and even los it once or twice, but he won battles armes with nothing but a mandolin. (195-196)

He noticed that a bedraggled and desiccated pink poppy was growing out of a crack where the wall of the teacher's house intersected with the cobbles of the street.

You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,' quoted Kokolios, looking at Stamatis significantly. 'I don't like your omelette,' said Stamatis. 'It's made with bad eggs, it tastes foul, and it makes me shit.' (62)

Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.