Quotes About Resilience

It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')

Alfred the Great] possessed the supreme military virtue of willingness to be taught by the enemy.

There'll be times," Pastor Taylor had told Sam in a quiet, hesitant voice, "when your flock will minister to you. Dark nights of the soul when it feels you've lost your way. And you have to let them. Sam, you have to let them help you.

Emily and Fanny are doing their best to remain poker-stiff, firmly staring in their upright palanquins. But two hours on an elephant is as much as either of them can stand, and—after four times as long as that—they pine, they simply ache for the opportunity to complain, even more than the chance to rest.

When you think of the Gay Plague, it's really for the best these days that we put on a cheerful face and get on with what queens do best.

If the people starve themselves in this manner then they will be unable to withstand the cold of winter or the heat of summer and countless numbers of them will grow ill and die.

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum.

I'm not much but I'm all I have.

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

But nothing surprises me now. I've grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight.

The living always get over the dead. That's what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they'd only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.

But in my wretched efforts to stay alive at almost any cost I could still hurt and be hurt in my turn, and as long as death's black barrel organ was playing it seemed I would have to dance to the cheerless, doom-filled tune that was turning inexorably on the drum, like some liveried monkey with a terrified rictus on its face and a tin cup in its hand. That didn't make me unusual; just German.

Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs.

In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage. Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

XVIII Si le chagrin pouvait Tel un charbon enfoui se consumer, Le cÅ"ur se reposerait calme, L'âme indéchirée serait Tranquille comme une voile ; Mais la nuit entière j'ai regardé Grandir du feu le silence, La cendre grise en douceur s'accroître : Et je remue le réfractaire silex Que délaissent les flammes dans l'âtre, Et le chagrin se remue, et le dextre CÅ"ur gît dans l'impuissance. (p. 31)

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

Be wise;Soar not too high to fall; but stoop to rise.

Patience, the beggar's virtue, shall find no harbor here.

Late one night, as he walked back alone from a Kasuals gig, a truck screeched to a halt beside him and a group of drunken white youths jumped out, screaming racial abuse. Jimmy took off across a cornfield, easily outdistanced his would-be attackers and then, rather like Cary Grant in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, lay doggo on top of Betty-Jean, until they gave up and drove away.

It's impossible to frighten such people….