Quotes About Resilience

Mama is beautiful," I said. "Mama is strong," he said. "Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever." "What about the old people?" "They are the strongest of all, for they have lived longer than all of us, and they have wisdom," he said, tapping his temple.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can't see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.

Every time I had seen men rise up, they had not prevailed and innocent people had died. Daddy

But being uncomfortable is a virtue, not a hindrance.

At best, Henry had only slowed an inevitable, history-shaping pandemic. Governments would fall. Economies would collapse. Wars would arise. Why did we think that our own modern era was immune to the assault of humanity's most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?

Majid and Henry sat on the floor, staring at each other in the dazed amazement that only survivors know, where every detail is newly crisp and each fresh moment is like a crust of ice on a pond, a thin tangible layer between life and death.

The crown prince laughed. "But this is the flu!" he said. "We have the flu every year! We all get the flu, even the royal family!

You spend way too much time confusing silence with strength.

I was in the machine. My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I'm out, I'm out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.

The third guy was different. He was what you got when you ate squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one.

Don't be sad that roses have thorns. Be glad that thorns have Roses. Today's the day I worried about yesterday and it didn't happen.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I worked thirteen years, got me nowhere. I feel like I tried it their way, and to hell with them. Now I'm going to try it my way.

You think you've been in deep shit before, and then you realise you have absolutely no conception of how deep shit can really be.

I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.

He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.

Nothing ever works like you predict it. All plans fall apart as soon as the first shot is fired.

You see four guys bunched on a corner waiting for you, you either run like hell in the opposite direction without hesitation, or you keep on walking without slowing down or speeding up or breaking stride...Truth is, it's smarter to run. The best fight is the one you don't have. But I have never claimed to be smart. Just obstinate, and occasionally bad-tempered. Some guys kick cats. I keep walking. - Jack Reacher

Don't worry about why it went wrong. Just damn well put it right.

In order to win, you must be prepared to lose.

This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of the Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.

I felt like someone else. I felt like a normal person. But I got over it.