Quotes About Resilience

Our enemies make us strong, Miss Muffet, not our friends. Our friends will lie to us, tell us what we need to hear. Forgive us. We must keep a few good enemies on hand, always, to keep us sharp and teach us never to do anything that needs forgiveness.

I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer.

As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did. They screamed. They fought. They slammed doors in a stranger's face. They ran. They doubted glib stories. They spotted flaws in those stories. They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.

And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted's needs. I don't feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that. I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.

I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn't afraid, and I didn't feel any pain—not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I've known that the soul doesn't die, only the body, and I've never been afraid.

He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

When we are at our weakest, God is at his best, ready to step in and say to us as he said to Hagar, "Do not be afraid" (Genesis 21:17).

I only know that one day you wake up and realize it doesn't hurt quite so much. Until then you can put yourself in the hands of God- He'll see you through. You can take it from someone who knows, dear. I've found his hands to be an easy place to rest.

But something pulled her through, and that was when I knew there was something more to faith than just believing in a God. It was knowing him in such a way that you could go through hell on earth and still say he is love.

But now you can't find me or reach me or hurt me ever again and once I tell the words I am going to kick you off my porch and learn to breathe again.

sometimes people couldn't be saved, no matter how much you wanted it, no matter how hard you tried.

When this uneasy feeling forms, in a context of awareness, the person is thereby already living beyond the problem, already living in and toward what would be right for her.

THERE IS NO BEATING THESE PEOPLE, though they seem beatable.

If you give up then someday you might give up on your own life.

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody "identified" me . . . and whispered in my ear . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes, I can."

I defend Not my voice, but my silence

I'm not weeping, I'm not complaining, Happiness is not for me.

I have much to do: I must kill my memories down to the last one, I must change my soul into stone , I must learn to live again.

Not under foreign skies Nor under foreign wings protected - I shared all this with my own people There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

I've ceased to smile long ago, The bitter winds now chill my lips, Another hope was just let go, Another song was added since. Against my will, I'll cede this song To people's laughter and offense, Because love's silence for the soul Is too unbearably immense.

Seaside gusts of wind, And a house in which we don't live, And the shadow of a cherished cedar In front of a forbidden window... Perhaps there is someone in this world To whom I could send all these lines. Well then! Let the lips smile bitterly And a tremor touch the heart again.

All my contemporaries— hundred-and-fivers or convicts— will tell you how we lived in barely sentient fear, raising children for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.

The Last Toast I drink to our demolished hose, to all this wickedness, to you, our loneliness together, I raise my glass - And to the dead-cold eyes, the lie that has betrayed us, the coarse, brutal world, the fact that God has not saved us. 1934

I, like a river, Have been diverted by the ruthless era. My life was switched. It flows Into another channel, past strange lands, And I no longer recognize my shores.