Quotes About Resilience

In fact, it wasn't evidence at all, but I didn't want to be a defeatist.

The next day I watched TV and read and lay on the couch and stared at my high-vaulted ceiling. Just after noon I showered and shaved and dressed and took a drive over to the County Medical Facility and asked them if I could see Mimi. They said no. I left the front and went around back and tried to sneak in, but a seventy-five-year-old security guard with narrow shoulders and a wide butt caught me and raised hell. It goes like that sometimes.

Men like Neff and Hensman lived between raindrops and worked under eaves.

For the longest time, Mimi Warren did not move, then she looked at me and said, "I don't feel anything." I said, "Kid, you've had so much done to you that the part that feels went dead a long time ago." Maybe Carol Hillegas could fix it. Mimi cocked her head the way a bird will, as if I'd said something curious, and smiled. "Is that what you think?

She looked at our hands, twined there in her lap. "I know you want to help me through this. You already have, and I'm grateful, but you can't help me anymore." She tugged at my hand, and when I looked over I think she was trying not to cry. "I will not have my life defined by triangles. It's not fair to you, and it's not fair to me. Richard is my mistake, and I have to live with it." I didn't know what to say.

of the gloom and up the middle

A BLACK CAT pushed through the cat door. His fine flat head was striped with scars, his eyes were angry yellow coals, and his ears were tattered from too many fights. One ear was cocked sideways from the time someone shot him. He circled Pike's legs, and flopped on his side. Purring. Pike picked him up and held him, the cat dripping off his arm as limp as liquid fur. Anyone else would lose a hand.

But adversity has a way of strengthening. If it doesn't kill you, you learn things.

Markov nodded and the steel fingers tightened into my shoulders like pliers. Alexei backhanded me with the Glock and a starburst of pain erupted from my other ear. Some days suck. Some days you shouldn't even get out of bed. I said, "Who is Clark Hewitt and why is he so important?

He made a sympathetic shrug, then spread his hands. "Flexibility, my friend. Flexibility is the key to all happiness. Remember that.

Yeah, well, try living with it. Getting old is hell.

His hair was a quarter-inch short, his skin was cooked dark, and his knuckles were scarred and coarse. Hydeck

I asked Pike, "Are you afraid?" He shook his head. "Would you be afraid at midnight if we were alone?" He walked a moment. "I have the capacity for great violence.

Moths swarmed around the parking lot lamps, banging into the glass with a steady tap-tap-tap, and I wondered if they welcomed the dawn. At dawn, they could stop slamming their heads into the thing that forever kept them from the light. People don't have a dawn. We just keep slamming away until it kills us.

Breathing hurt. He thought he might be bleeding to death, but he didn't have time to die. Pike

Joseph was left for dead by his jealous brothers, yet he rose to power in Egypt. Having the opportunity to punish those same brothers years later, he instead showed unconditional love, embracing and helping them before they ever repented.

those who will not forgive for themselves or for the sake of the offender will be motivated to forgive because they see that they hurt others by deciding to hold on to resentment.

Take the architectural legacy of Bucharest: Byzantine, Brâncoveanu, Ottoman, Renaissance, Venetian Classical, French Baroque, Austrian Secession, Art Deco, and Modernist, all writhing and struggling to break free of a dirty gray sea of pillbox Stalinism, like Michelangelo's Unfinished Slaves struggling to break free of their marble blocks.

Romania, as I am forced to refer to it, constitutes one of those indigestible ethnic nations, like Georgia and Armenia, that have miraculously survived the millennia despite being oppressed, overrun, and vanquished.

Oman is an example of how globalization at its best is built on vigorous localisms that can survive the onslaught of destructive commercial forces.

The first recollection started as a trickle that, as soon as I attempted to block it, found another path to weep through, the way water will always bleed through concrete, no matter how many times you patch it.

some pain never fully resolved. You just suppressed it beneath a façade of normalcy.

All I know is, the more I rebuilt, the more I realized that just because things hadn't worked out as I'd planned didn't mean things couldn't work out at all.

Regret is so much harder to live with than failure