Quotes About Resilience

when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?

There are those who see despair as solidarity with the oppressed, though the oppressed may not particularly desire that version of themselves, since they may have had a life before being victims and might hope to have one after.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future

A significant portion of the women you know are survivors.

though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn't enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons

Here is that road, maybe a thousand miles long, and the woman walking down it isn't at mile one. I don't know how far she has to go, but I know she's not going backward, despite it all - and she's not walking alone.

breaking through the barriers which life's routine had concreted around the deeper strata of the will, and gradually bringing its unused energies into action." And he spoke of the "stores of bottled up energy and endurance" that people in the earthquake had discovered within themselves.

James's investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences.

now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost.

Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society.

David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes, "Part of trauma's corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and . . . stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power for both the teller and the listener.

What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.

To recognize the momentousness of what has happened is to apprehend what might happen. Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality.

En mi opinión, su habilidad más importante era sencillamente el optimismo que les hacía pensar que iban a sobrevivir y encontrar el camino».

No perderte nunca es no vivir

One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante's Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi's despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. . . . Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.

cause London is drowning and I— I live by the river.

when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

The utopias built by citizens like Anna Holshouser are not yet on that map. But they should be. [active during 1906 earthquake and fire in SF CA]

Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don't need to or can't go down it.

Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I'd done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play.