Quotes About Resilience

My body was broken - just how badly I wouldn't find out until later - but I felt healed. Healed at last.

That's how children deal with terror. They fall asleep.

Laila imagines she sees little Mariam there in the hut as a woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but SHAPED by by the turbulence that washes over her.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms.

The lucky ones, the ones who weren't here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we're not entitled to them.

Rahim, a boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.

YüreÄŸi çöküverdi, ta ayaklar?n?n dibine kadar.

What I have in ample supply here is children who've lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones.

And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

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

c'est une erreur d'affirmer qu'on peut enterrer le passé, il s'accroche tant et si bien qu'il remonte toujours à la surface.

Kalau kau tidak terus-terusan melihat ke langit, kau tidak akan bertahan lama.

Seorang anak laki-laki yang tak mampu membela dirinya sendiri akan tumbuh menjadi pria yang tak mampu menghadapi masalah apapun.

Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life.

But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.

I rescued him from the certainty of a turmoil and put him in a turmoil of uncertainty.

I want to scream again, and I remember that last time I felt this way, riding with Baba in the tank of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with other refugees. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my leg blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight.

Zendagi migzara

Znaš li ti, uop?e, koliko te je Bog napravio jakom? Koliko jakom i dobrom te je napravio?

It was Homaira and me against the world. And I'll tell you this, Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.

But for a moment, standing there with Tariq in the sunlight, it was as though those years had never happened. Her parents deaths, her marriage to Rasheed, the killings, the rockets, the Taliban, the beatings, the hunger, even her children, all of it seemed like a dream, a bizarre detour, a mere interlude between that last afternoon together and this moment.

if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.

December 2001 I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. 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. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose.