Quotes About Adversity

There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.

As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.

They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden.

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here:

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape

Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.

That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.

Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.

If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes.

After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, you need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. Evincing a better self, in response to things that have caused you hurt.

This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.

Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries.

Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience

There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it

Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.

A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.

We do not seek painful experiences that adhere to our identities but rather we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences

Andrew Solomon

Some people can bear a great deal of pain and still experience great happiness, while others are made unrelentingly miserable by less acute pain.

I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated.

it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind. I

Returning from distress by gradual degrees gives sense to affliction itself.