Quotes About Resilience

even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us.

They looked young, even Nevil, who'd had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts—Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama—seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men.

I became convinced that to survive I would have to remake the world so that it came closer to matching its own ideals.

When the men at the counter weren't slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn't want to sell.

Growing up was like falling into a hole.

Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.

I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again.

I had to say to her that it isn't just men, and it isn't just men "like that." I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.

Both of us had grown up believing that being beaten is normal, that being backhanded is ordinary, that being called names is a regular part of life. That everyone does it, that they just don't talk about it in public.

It's harder to come back than it is to arrive.

And if there's no trouble, you'll make it,' offered Will Scott, his eyes bright, his cheeks red. 'No. At the moment,' affirmed Lymond grimly, 'I am having truck with nothing less than total calamity.

Go away and bleed to death,' said his onetime saviour sharply. 'On behalf of the female sex I feel I may cheer every lesion.

But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.

Lion-hearted; her tremors braced with virtue, Philippa trotted on.

Tobie. Unless I'm giving off steam, behave normally. I remember what to do. One foot in front of the other, but not both at the same time unless I'm a robin.

There are times,' said Philippa shortly, 'when I feel like the entire Russian army.' 'There are times," said Lymond equally shortly, 'when I wish that you were. It would solve the whole Tartar problem and save Ottoman Turkey for Jesus.

Better to be whipped than humoured; better to be crushed than cherished.… It was a woman told me that. I live in a world of men, my dear,' Lymond had said. 'I love you all, but I shall never marry you.

He was not a figment of daydream or of fantasy. He was the quick-witted man who had raced with her; the man whose strong wrists had pulled her from trouble; whose laughter recognized, more than his own, her buffoonery; whose voice had whispered, sung, exclaimed or cursed, with equal felicity, carefree as birdsong on top of their striving. Whose essence, stripped by necessity was, it now seemed, warm and joyous and of great generosity.

You've got one hero too many already. Stand on your own feet, Brother. It's good for the soul.

A trained fighting man, accustomed to hard words and hard blows and the company of men like himself, for years ruled by the self-discipline required by the world's greatest order of chivalry, Jerott had come to terms now with the fact that one man could make him feel and act like a rhinoceros in a cloud of mosquitoes.

It won't help you," said Scott. "Nothing ever does. That's why I help myself so frequently.

With Jerott Blyth, innkeepers never shirked the proper discharge of their duties. To the doggedness of his Scottish birth, his long residence in France and his profession of arms had lent a particular fluency. He was black-haired, and prepossessing and rude: a masterful combination.

There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed.

No. I won't. I won't bend my knee, or kiss your charming shoes either. I may possibly fall flat on my face, but that will be quite inadvertent.