Quotes About Adversity

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.

When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?

But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll;

In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat.

It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.

Get thee behind me, Satan. Seek not come between a lover and his love.

What can't be cured must be endured.

All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.

His mother had survived decades of marriage to his angry, disappointed, alcoholic father by developing what she called a "forgettery" instead of a memory. She woke up every day and forgot the day before. He, too, seemed to lack a memory for trouble, and woke up remembering only what he yearned for. But he did not act upon his yearning. She had left for America and that was for the best.

But great tragedy is universal

Siz olsan?z, s?n?rlar?n karanl?k taraf?na sürgün edildiÄŸinizde karanl??? ayd?nl??a çevirmeye çal??maz m?yd?n?z?

Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.

life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.

It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.

Sometimes it is necessary to touch bottom in order to know which way is up; to go a long distance down the wrong road before you know the right way

Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread you've got, the less shit you eat.

Life damages the living.

Any new idea is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: What kind of an idea are you? Are you the kind the compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society? Aims to find a niche to survive? Or are you the cursed, bloody-minded ram rod type of damn fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind, that almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred , be smashed to bits, but the hundredth time will change the world?

Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

Hayat?m?n doÄŸal ak???ndan sürgün edilince bildiÄŸim her ÅŸeyin z?tt?n? sahiplenmekten baÅŸka ne ÅŸans?m vard?? Kar??-natüralizmi kastediyorum, o tersi düz, say?klamal?, abuk sabuk günlerin tek gerçek izmi. Siz olsan?z, s?n?rlar?n karanl?k taraf?na sürgün edildiÄŸinizde karanl??? ayd?nl??a çevirmeye çal??maz m?yd?n?z?

When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.