Quotes About Resilience

You don't need cheering up. You need a good shaking.

I seemed to have only two speeds on problems that hit me emotionally, either putting my fingers in my ears and going la-la-la, or picking up an axe and attacking the issue.

You have to fight to carve little pieces of happiness out of your life, or the everyday emergencies will eat up everything.

You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought.

Our hearts are like starfish, regenerating what we've lost. We move forward, regroup, reconfigure; people find ways to be happy.

He was fed up with me by then; I knew that: the way my sadness was a suit of armor. How securely I kept him out.

Death smashes a crater into your life, and you're left alone to sort through the rubble.

We must eat, drink, sleep, be idle, have sex, love, touch the sweetest things in life and yet not succumb to them.

Her eyes were as hard and bright as stars. Not the pretty sort that poets mooned about, but the kind that made men's destinies.

Amy read Ovid and Virgil and Aristophanes and Homer. She read dry histories and scandalous love poetry (her governesses, who had little Latin and less Greek, naïvely assumed that anything in a classical tongue must be respectable), but mostly she returned again and again to The Odyssey. Odysseus had fought to go home, and so would Amy.

I should have known something was wrong when my advisor's parting words were Good luck. To his credit, he had—very gently—suggested that I might want to consider a different sort of topic. But I didn't want to consider another topic. I was madly in love with my topic: "Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France, 1789- 1815." It had dash, it had swash, it had buckle.

Swooning solves nothing.

I will be a bonfire and dare the world to put me out.

de lo que se conoce con el nombre de perseverancia cuando la causa es buena,—y con el de obstinación cuando es mala.

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

Vivo en un continuo esfuerzo para guardarme, por medio de la alegría, de los achaques de una salud precaria y otros males de la vida: firmemente persuadido de que cada vez que un hombre sonríe, pero mucho más cuando se ríe, se le añade algo a este Fragmento de Vida».

We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it

Life is never smooth to the great-granddaughter of tin peddlers who were kicked out of Russia,' said Misty. 'It's no accident that all my family is in one embattled profession or another. We're just waiting for the Cossacks to come back. When the Cossacks come to Connecticut, you'll understand.' Meanwhile, it was hard to feel much gloom at all, although to keep her balance, Misty clung to it wherever she found it.

The only people don't suffer those are the ones who never do anything

IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.

We held hands when we walked down the gingerbread path into the forest, blood dripping from our fingers. We danced with witches and kissed monsters. We turned us into wintergirls, when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.

A scar is a sign of strength. . .the sign of a survivor.

She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn't scream when he took the first bite.

A little kid asks my dad why that man is chopping down the tree. Dad: He's not chopping it down. He's saving it. Those branches were long dead from disease. All plants are like that. By cutting off the damage you make it possible for the tree to grow again. You watch - by the end of summer, this tree will be the strongest on the block.