Quotes About Resilience

Elephants gave you less bother, any day.

You need bed and a hot drink and a little less fluent self-pity.

Why?' said Philippa. 'For suffering what you have suffered for three months?' And felt the veils rend about her, for she had broken the unwritten law: it must not be uttered. It must not be uttered, or they could not bear the pain, mirrored over and over.

Oh, Marigold!" Lymond spoke plaintively. "A silken tongue, a heart of cruelty. Don't berate us. We're only poor scoundrels—vagabonds—scraps of society; unlettered and untaught.

Are you mourning? Seneca says a wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can. You should be pleased. At last Francis has managed to follow his own misguided path without the rest of us consuming time and energy on setting him right.

Then I tell you," Sybilla said, "that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live. You live until no device of priest or leech will hold the web of your body together. And when you walk from this room, you turn your back on France and your face towards the place of your life's work. I want your oath that you will come back to Scotland.

It was hard to say therefore why he did not go below, and rally his brother, and encourage him to let the past fade, and look forward to what lay before him. Unless, in his heart of hearts he recognized as Lymond did that what lay around him were shut gates; and what lay before him was nothing.

any country which has suffered a reverse of fortune instantly turns on its nonconformists.

She may be hoping for Lug of the Long Arms but what she has is the family Crawford, qui peut de tous bois faire flèches in order to sit in the butts and shoot hearty rounds at each other.

I have been told to live in Scotland, and I shall do it, but I doubt if it will be to Scotland's benefit. There are handicaps, I have found, more crippling than blindness. Even the part of me that did not come back from Dourlans would hardly have made you a whole man.

Poor bloody bastard: he hasn't a chance, has he? Kicked from cradle to whorehouse; his mother slaughtered by Gabriel, his father propped up by opium.

That made Richard leave her, to walk back over the hill. After a moment Jerott rose and walked back also, to meet Adam and Kate and say what had to be said to Sybilla. That now she had one son only living. That Francis, the best loved of the three, had now left her.

Because you have done all that skill could devise to present a detached case, and failed. Because you are asking for help, and you hate asking for help. [...] This may be,' said Richard with unexpected wry humour, 'a crusade conducted by the Culter family solo in a band of dissentients, but I am with you.

It cost something: it cost almost more than she could manage to fight, and to keep on fighting, by this time.

Level-headed and constructive to the end,' Philippa said, 'in confronting all your personal problems. And now? A trifle of hemlock?

I had no expectations,' Philippa said. The tears stood still on her face. 'This is one lesson I know by heart already.

I want you to slip it under Mademoiselle d'Albon's chamber door. If she opens it and throws an axe at you, come and tell me. If not, you may go back to bed.

If we surrender we'll get our throats cut anyway. Let's go out in a blaze of glory.

He had survived that. He would survive this.

How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?

As if nothing had happened.' 'Well. Nobody knows.

Señor, more wine? I am amazed,' said the captain, 'that so lovely a lady has not married.' 'But indeed she has married,' said Lymond. 'Five times. And not one husband, poor fellow, survived matrimony by more than a year. She is too good for them. The last one, dying, compared her to a nugget of gold. Do you melt it or do you rub it or do you beat it, said he, it shineth still more orient.

He had been as careful as he knew how to be, but it had not been enough because he too had been hurt, by a loss he could afford less than Richard.

She's got sense, that girl; and too much backbone to push herself where she's not wanted. Tell her it's no good, and she'll soon see the point.