Quotes About Resilience

You don't like it here? Why didn't you keep out, then, for God's sake, while you had the chance? Anyhow, it's no good moaning and snivelling now. Put a good face on it. Be tough. Show the crowd you can take it. You're an individualist, aren't you? To hell with the crowd. What do you care about them? You're here because you've got no time for the crowd. What do you care about them and their damnfool heaven? To hell with heaven, anyway.

They are honourable and precious to me, these books, in proportion to their great heroism. They are like members of a suicide squad who do not hesitate to engage the enormously superior enemy, life, upon my behalf.

The thing which does surprise me is my own optimism. Surely I ought to recognize now that my number is up. Where do I always find enough courage for one more last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.

Hope doesn't come from calculating whether the good news is winning out over the bad. It's simply a choice to take action.

Remember even though the outside world might be raining, if you keep on smiling the sun will soon show its face and smile back at you.

Do what comes into your life and do it well... Be polite without groveling. If you are ever afraid of anything, do not deny it, but behave as if you feared nothing.

I always know what to expect of the things of Mother Earth. Sometimes they are cruel, but it is hard, clean cruelty. They don't torture you with their own weakness.

People and trees are caught in irreversible histories of disturbance. But some kinds of disturbance have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives.

No, one could speak neither of distressed or of destitute; this street was, instead, smiling and terrible, much like the expression of intelligence and generosity that the faces of the dead have. It was a dead street, or at least that's how I defined it to myself, hoping to be able to find later a less vehement and irrational description, something that turned out to be impossible.

When I look back on my life's greatest traumas...I see that each one has something in common. No matter how life-shattering they felt at the time, there was an end to them.

You can hate a person with your whole body, but love is a stubborn thing, it clings on in your heart.

Lot's of things in life aren't right, but most things get better with time.

I think it's an amazing quality to be able to roll with the punches and not be totally ruined as a person because life's been rough for you. That's a really admirable way to go through your life.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva: 28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)

When you're young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different—it paralyzes you.

She had never been able to stand her husband, though not for one minute in their married life had she permitted this to make her unhappy. Only people who are fond of somebody can ever be unhappy, she had told her daughter before her wedding.

Before the eyes of the SA unit that had not yet marched off, Beutler crawled the last stretch without help. Not on his knees, but rather, perhaps because he'd been kicked, sideways so that his face was turned up. And now as the man crept past him, Bunsen, looking down, noticed what was special about the face. It was laughing. The recaptured prisoner lay there in his bloody smock, with blood in his ears, and his large white teeth showing, and he seemed to be writhing in silent laughter.

Wait, I thought to myself! He wants to wait until everything that once was dear to him is trampled under foot.

And all the time they threatened me with everything they could possibly threaten me with. All that was lacking was hellfire. They really wanted to make me think they were the Last Judgment. But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. All they know is what you tell them.

Even if he had only enough strength left to take one tiny step toward freedom, no matter how ridiculous and useless the step might be, he was going to take it.

If you're fighting and are killed, another takes up the banner and he fights and is killed too, and the next one takes up the flag and dies too. That's the natural sequence of events, for you don't get anything for nothing. But what if there's no one there who wants to take up the flag because no one knows its meaning?