Quotes About Resilience

Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe until she falls.

Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.

When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails.

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.

Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game.

I can stand anything I have to stand!

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.

but she's as blunt as a splitting maul." She thinks about that, walking again.

Whatever we thought about art and its relation to life, we knew that the Faulkner motto we had adopted in harder times no longer served. "They kilt us but they ain't whupped us yit" was no watchword for this world so full of interest, instruction, suggestiveness, possibility,

But the day that had started crooked insisted on going crooked, like a cross-threaded screw.

That have I borne, this can I bear also.

You've got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan," Sally said. "I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.

In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—De Senectute, on old age; De Amicitia, on friendship. De Senectute, with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But De Amicitia I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The

She resents rusting unburnished when she wants to shine in use.

like the discomforts of a camping trip that become hilarious in the telling, the verbal formulation of distress has the capacity to cure it.

harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge or taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

We keep coming back and coming backTo the real: to the hotel instead of the hymnsThat fall upon it out of the wind.