Quotes About Resilience

You're not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.

I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.

Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for most part has been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.

That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently on the people below - As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us

If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.

They would make new lives for themselves—peaceful, solitary lives—and there the weight of all that they'd endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find.

How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.

Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper, a moan- to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

Do you even know how strong God has made you? she said. How strong and good He has made you?

sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.

Mostly, though, I dream of good things...I dream that flowers will bloom in the streets..again and music will play in the...houses and kites will fly in the skies.

Mariam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.

Bareh tu hazar dafa!

Zendagi migzara, we say, life goes on.

I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and I am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost,grasping for breath.

Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.