Quotes About Adversity

It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Life is not a submarine.

it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

Haters want us to hate them because hate is incapacitating. When we hate we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength.

Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all my best skills, intentions, and good ideas.

In the face of everything, we slowly come through.

to be born into this world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets that would die and acne and seventh=grade dances and AIDS.

How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this.

we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.

And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating.

Someone said the softest things in the world overcome the hardest.

I came into this world with mercy for nearly everyone, everywhere, and for all cats and dogs at the pound. A fat lot of good it did me. By five years old, I had migraines and the first signs of OCD. By about age six, along with innocence and wonder and truth, I put away childish things. They said to, the people in charge of keeping me alive. I did.

Mattie saw herself and Angela as the trees that grew out of cliffs and boulders above the ocean near Monterey—evergreen creatures, windswept, magnificent, twisty, gnarled pines growing out of the layers of rock, where maybe there had once been some nutrition, maybe there had once been soil from which the trees had sprung, but then the soil had blown away, and they still grew.

Nothing worked consistently anymore, not the illusion or the self-made glue that had held them together, not even the armature of habit. For years, when she

Dread was my governess growing up.

We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the the stakes or the pain is high enough.

Physical injury is the least of the harmful accidents that this universe inflicts on its inhabitants; it is soonest mended.

It isn't for the moment you are stuck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity, faith and security.

It is hard to recognize, or even to describe, but I think this freedom is the real reason the book continues to be so well loved and so well read after all these years. I am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change.

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.