Quotes About Resilience

There are two kinds of strength,' he added, reflecting on years gone by. 'Power and the ability to wield it is obvious, but resilience, the ability to resist power, is the other.

With bullies it's always the same: whether or not you can best them doesn't matter. What is important is whether or not you'll stand up to them.

for to change anything in your past would risk turning you into less than you are now.

He stood staring at the water as it rippled and calmed. It was the only thing Daylon could see that wasn't covered in death; all around him, the mud of the battlefield was awash in piss, shit, and blood, pieces of what had once been brave men, and the muck covered banners of fools.

He'll get over it,' said his father. 'But to speed it along, he needs to know that pain will come. The knack is to not engage the pain, not hold on to it like a treasured thing, but to simply let it pass through and wait until it's gone. It will come less frequently and after a time, be gone.

Sergeant Harper.

Hannah kept her eyes forward, trained on two rows of rusted showerheads stuck in facing walls. Sixteen in all. The room was paved with white tile, chipped and discolored by age and use.

she was an army of one and was stronger than the invading force.

Sometimes the greatest gifts can be found in the darkest, deepest closets of the mind.

1. She couldn't count on anyone, not even God, to help her. 2. Something was wrong with her; otherwise, the abuse wouldn't have happened. 3. She had no control over her life (which led to the development of a victim mentality). 4. She was inadequate and didn't deserve good things.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.

Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

We die all the time to avoid being killed.

Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world," said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.

Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.

Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful efforts keeps us awake.