Quotes About Resilience

There is little you cannot already guess. You know now what you want. You are about to learn how to give. But the hardest lesson of all is accepting. Am I not right?

Jerott stared up through his headache. 'I can manage,' he said. 'Yes. I think you'll manage better tied to your horse,' said Lymond.

I have nothing to lose,' Marthe said. 'So nothing can harm me.

Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.

His chest heaved, and he coughed. You have coughed before, his mother said. It is a sign of weakness. Control it.

He was not his own master when he left Russia,' Sybilla said. 'Nor was he his own master when you brought him to France. He is like a river forced into glass and driven from stem to stem of a conjurer's maze without ever reaching the sea.

Because, I think, of something you said. One should be able to face anything. I have learned to play chess again. I have learned to listen to music, and to play it. I have learned to buy self-indulgence and enjoy it. I have learned to take a line of logic and follow it through, whatever the consequences.

Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters.

You promise food and horses and nonresistance and when they invade, you do or don't lick their boots according to the thickness of your walls and the kind of conscience you have.

I have given you nothing. I have shown you what was there in you already, and you have been man enough to destroy what is weak and to foster what is strong until it is unassailable.

I wasn't offering her pity, Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.

If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

She drew herself up to her full height—it was a little difficult on a donkey—and said primly, "I have always found that in painful situations it is a sensible idea to take each hour as it comes and not to anticipate beyond. But oh how I wish I could have a bath!

Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity--births, widowhood, illnesses--and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well.

It wasn't that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit.

But a certain perspective is needed about tragedies, Betsy, for they happen to nearly everyone. Eventually you have to learn, try to learn, that it's the eternal things that matter, and among them courage.

The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.

Each evening, after my parents' self-medication, their behavior would change. Some of the time they would be happier and we could get through the evening unscathed. But sometimes it would get ugly.

We are not a problem people, we are people with problems.

It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling--it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt.

I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue.

Well, well. What can't be cured must be endured. This is our last hope gone. We shall be reduced to ringing minors.

Let the galled jade wince'—