Quotes About Resilience

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.

Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?

But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.

What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.

Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can't so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots. ("A Short History of Silence")

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.

Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because the key in survival is knowing you're lost: they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Davis calls PTSD living at the whim of your worst memories.

Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister's and brother's keeper.

Nothing is ever so good that it can't stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.

She regained the voice taken away from her and with it rehumanized her dehumanized self. She spoke words that built a cage around him, erected a monument to his casual malice, words that will likely follow him all his life. Her voice was her power.

the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

We don't even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

the backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning.

Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

There are other things I'd rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. 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.

the task of finding one's own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as savages or the servants or the people who don't matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.

We are winning," said the graffiti in Seattle, not "We have won." It's a way of telling in which you can feel successful without feeling smug, in which you can feel challenged without feeling defeated.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.