Quotes About Adversity

He should have been drowned at birth.

Vincent Benét's poem The Ballad of William Sycamore.

rip our bottom out.

I was fed a little. I was given water. And I was visited by no one.

Learn from me and avoid the scars your soul and mind will take, let

but never let them think there's an end to what you have, for then you will be thrown into the worst hole they have and left to rot. There

way among the rocks. Occasionally he was exposed, but there were no more shots. Either he was unseen, and they were deliberately allowing him to get to the cabin, or they had moved out to try to cross farther up, away from his line of fire, and so come down behind

When I awakened I was cold, colder than I had ever been before.

If I catch you on my back trail, no matter what you're hunting, I'll stake each of you to six feet of northern Arizona that nobody will ever take away from you.

It was a life that had left him rich in experience, but poor in goods of the world. The experience was the hard-fisted experience of cold winters, dry ranges, and the dusty bitterness

I have only strength and ingenuity, and neither trade nor land.

the very idea of taking a risk that was not demanded by circumstances was repugnant to him.

Nothing in his life had given him confidence in his hold upon the future. All he had learned indicated that one lived by avoiding trouble, or if it could not be avoided, seeing it first.

but two shots, and then it was the knife until death.

It was a life that had left him rich in experience, but poor in goods of the world.

fighting man. Loss Degner was bad all through and made no

Whenever was it easy for such a man as I? The scars I carry speak of no easy times, lad

men must always remember, that civilization is a flimsy cloak, and just outside are hunger, thirst, and cold…waiting.

He wasn't tough. A tough man has to win and lose. He has to come up after being knocked down, he has to have taken a few beatings, and know what it means to win the hard way. Anybody, he said dryly, can knock a man down. When you've been knocked down at least three times yourself, and then got up and floored the other man, then you can figure you're a tough hombre.

opening. Sticks were broken, a fire started.

were stiff and

It is always easier to die, simply to give up, to surrender and let the pain die with you. To fight is to keep pain alive, even to intensify it. And this requires courage for which i had only admiration.

When you know that you know persecution comes easy.

When you spend your whole life living in a hole," he said, "the only way you can go is up.