Quotes About Resilience

If I'd known this was life here I would have stayed in Syria and handed myself over to ISIS. It's better to die once than die slowly every day.

We've accepted the fact that we need to make our dreams smaller if that's what it takes to keep dreaming.

You just adapted to oppression and rotted along with it.

In the morning, we'd take an injured person to the hospital with a gunshot wound in his leg. That night, we'd return to find him dead with a gunshot to the head.

We had money, but there was nothing to buy. Instead, my husband would collect grass and leaves and we'd fry them in olive oil.

I was arrested in my second year of medical school and spent five months in prison. I was home recovering when ISIS showed up.

Last year, they shelled the market on the holiday at the end of Ramadan. People left the market. Half an hour later, everyone returned and went back to buying and selling.

We spent eight months living in different places. Sometimes we found places to rent and sometimes we didn't. It was like a vacation, but with bombing.

I lived under ISIS rule for a year and a half. ISIS forced us to go out and watch them cut off people's heads. It was scary for kids at the beginning, but then they got used to it.

Please do not make me reach for my inner Annie Oakley because she often hangs out with my inner Calamity Jane.

And I suppose in a way you have to hand it to the ex-East End orphan named Lily Shiel. Just what to hand her, I'd be hard put to say.

hace falta mucha más entereza para manifestar emociones que para reprimirlas.

No creo que haya ninguna muerte indolora, aunque solo dure un segundo. Aunque nos corten la cabeza o nos disparen en el corazón. La vida es demasiado fuerte para desaparecer sin algún tipo de sufrimiento.

If you were to touch a hot stove and burn your hand, but later were made to forget how you got the burn, your body would still have the fear of being burned. Only it would not be activated only by hear, or a red-hot burner on a stove. It would come and go at its leisure, and you would have no idea how to stop it.

The seeds of doubt grow like weeds when given enough sun. Enough water. Enough nurturing.

Don't run from the pain. You have to feel it before it will get better.

No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.

I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation.

What defines us isn't how we behave when things are good, Andrew, but how we respond when they aren't.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. . . . If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him. —EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Getting older is definitely not for sissies." But then neither, it seemed, was marriage.

And remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. Only she did it backwards and in heels.

Like Pig-Pen from the Charlie Brown comic strip, her cloud hovered over her, dark and daunting and devoid of a silver lining.

Women survived heartache and disappointment all the time, and daily demands that men could never fathom.