Quotes About Resilience

A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy

You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assaults of time.

Sam believes in taking life in his two hands and squeezing and pounding it until it gives you something, even if it's just a little bit. But the important thing is to keep squeezing, keep pounding, keep working.

There was hope, not much hope, but some, that her husband would change. She dreamed he would stop drinking up his paycheck, stop disappearing for days, for weeks, for months. She dreamed he would stop running around and shaming her, dreamed she would not have to beg him for money for milk for the baby, Sam. She dreamed that this time it might be bearable, it might last. She didn't want much, really, just something decent. All she got was me.

Dodging potholes so old and deep that the devil must use them as a shortcut home...

These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.

I believe a cast-off dog does not easily forget the life it had before.

But I don't think any dog knows home better than one thrown anway once already.

Does he bite?" the driver asked. "He even bites me," I said. He picked a fight with whatever the world brought him, and that day it happened to be a Lincoln. I don't think he would have hurt the driver, but he sure would have messed up a nice suit. The next week he did it again, and the next.

If it had not been for clam chowder, I would have jumped from a bridge into the frozen River Charles.

The past is where we go when we are helpless; the past, no matter what the psychiatrists say, can't really hurt you much more than it already has, not like the future, which comes at you like a train around a blind curve.

A lot of the people dancing were the same ones I had seen the night before. One of them, Ted Couvillion, said hello. "My wife died of cancer two years ago," he said. He vanished into his grief, until his friends dragged him out dancing. Now, every week, he dances and dances his way out of heartache. I can't dance a lick. But I have two bags of cracklin's in the trunk of my car.

Even though his pocket's were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was poor as poor got outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like a suit of mail (...) I think it's much more civilized to knock someone on their ass, than the cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York.

Even though his pockets were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was as poor as poor could get outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like mail. (...) I think it is much more civilized to knock someone on his ass than cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York

It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking.

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.