Quotes About Adversity

We live in a culture that celebrates determination and hard work, but understand, these are the qualities that keep you in the game after most everybody else has left - or until somebody bigger and stronger picks you up and hurls you back out to sea.

I think one of my best qualities is my ability to empathize with people. Perhaps it's because my journey has been so bumpy.

And my father didn't have money for me to go to college. And at that particular time they didn't have black quarterbacks, and I don't think I could have made it in basketball, because I was only 5' 11". So I just picked baseball.

Jay Cutler, he's a fine quarterback, but I think at times he gets a little nicked up.

I think the only time I doubted myself was my senior year in high school. I was not offered a Division I scholarship. I remember a scout from Ohio State coming in and looking at my film. He was all excited to meet me. Then he met me and I was 5'10" and he said that I was not a Division I quarterback.

My advice to the next quarterback that misses an entire year is to understand there is a little difference going out on the road again. You miss that. When you're hurt, you do not feel like you are part of it.

When you look at the best of the best, those quarterbacks played with one team. And if you point at a couple guys who didn't, who changed teams, it really was against their will.

Since I was a D-team backup quarterback in seventh grade, I've loved the game.

I'm not the first quarterback to have an off game. I won't be the last.

Playing quarterback you're always going to get booed - eventually.

You hear about how many fourth quarter comebacks that a guy has and I think it means a guy screwed up in the first three quarters.

I do still have some of the experience from playing, but it's been so long since I've been out in those quarters, semis, finals, the important final matches, just against the top players.

Closing games out in this league is hard. You have a lot of good players that you are facing, and fourth quarters are tough to handle because teams are going to make their run.

You don't forget crises and neither does the Queen.

Back on Nov. 23, 1963, I sailed into Manhattan Harbor onboard the Queen Mary and landed with no job and contacts and just $135 in my pocket. My first lodging was in a rundown hotel for $27 a week with the bathroom down the end of a corridor of beds.

My first year at Queen's Park, I just wasn't good enough, but that tough period shaped me.

As African American, gay drag queens, we live with more adversity and challenges.

Whenever something's really hard, you always question yourself, and I had many times when I questioned myself, but I always rose above it.

I take life easy, not questioning every time the going gets tough.

This life and this job and this position that I'm put in, it forces you to grow up quick. I definitely got dropped in the deep end.

I've always been someone who, without wanting to or without trying to, I draw attention to myself sometimes in negative ways. It made me sharp, and it made me quick.

Luckily I'm a quick healer.

I got bullied a lot when I was a kid, and because of that I thought for the most part that I didn't really have a childhood - I had to grow up so quick and there was no real enjoyment in that for me.

My mum died of leukemia when I was in high school - she lost her life at 40. It was very hard, and I didn't do that much in Chicago after that. I actually sat around and didn't do anything for three years. I didn't know what I wanted to do anymore because my everything was gone. I was a mama's boy, and I had to turn into a man real quick.