Quotes About Resilience

Life was very hard, so hard that I could hardly breathe sometimes

We had a bad class status. That was why An Yi was not allowed to wear mourning bands or even cry aloud for her grandmother. That was why my house was searched, and strangers could come in and do whatever they wanted. It was just a simple fact. Why should I ask why? There was absolutely nothing I could do to change it.

The Red Guards at her school held struggle meetings to criticize her almost every day. During those struggle meetings they beat her and whipped her with their belts.

After thinking so much about that time, I wanted to do something for the little girl I had been, and for all the children who lost their childhoods as I did. This book is the result.

Most important, I had to be willing to try. The try is everything. The try is me saying to my brain, hey, I value this connection and I want it to happen. I may have to try, try, and try again with no results for a thousand times before I get even an inkling of a result, but if I don't try, it may never happen. G.G.

Learning to read again was by far the hardest thing I had to do. I don't know if those cells in my brain had died or what, but I had no recollection that reading was something I had ever done before, and I thought the concept was ridiculous.

If you are stuck sweating on a sandbar in the river of your life you've got to find a way back into those swift effervescent currents of joy that are your birthright.

I believe that the ability to laugh at oneself is fundamental to the resiliency of the human spirit.

The lesson of the Funk Dog: "You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten—or just a low-grad funk—seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don't believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.

I never crush a relationship dead, I once boasted. Meaning: I always leave something in case I want to pick it up later.)

You have to hang in there, because two or three years later, the gremlins will return your child, and he will be wonderful again.

God made Labrador in six days. And on the seventh, he threw rocks at it. —Old Newfoundland saying

Jewish refugees trying to flee to the United States found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than four dollars out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone "likely to become a public charge.

Lange, who had been stricken by polio at the age of seven and walked with a painful limp, had become famous for the achingly sympathetic photographs she'd taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. "Cripples know about each other," she said of her ability to capture suffering on film.

How do people reconcile themselves to war's worst cruelties?

W. E. B. Du Bois was walking from his rooms on campus to deliver to the offices of a city newspaper a restrained essay about the lynching of Sam Hose, a black farmer, when he saw, displayed in a store window, Hose's knuckles. Hose had been dismembered, and barbecued, his body parts sold as souvenirs.

Of the more than two hundred black churches and homes that had been bombed in the South since 1948, more bombs had gone off in Birmingham than in any other city.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?"2

On the surface she might put on a good show, making fun of herself and her manless state, but inwardly it was hard sometimes not to wonder: Why me?

There was an element of risk - however small - in everything. You just had to accept that and get on with it.

No one should have to dance backward all of their lives.

Don't stop dreaming just because you had a nightmare.

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, someone will hand you a shovel.

Love is when someone puts you on a pedestal and yet when you fall, they're there to catch you anyway.' - Tara Daniels