Quotes About Resilience

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him. Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another.

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions?

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.

Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.

Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.

The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.

Je zit er nog middenin. Je zult er altijd middenin blijven zitten. Nee, niet letterlijk. Maar in je hart. Niets houdt ooit op, niet als het zo diep is gaan zitten. Je zult altijd met een open wond blijven rondlopen. Dat is na verloop van tijd nog de enige keus. Met een open wond rondlopen of dood. Denk je ook niet?

Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.

Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak

you have blown a large breach in the walls of my existence.

Manchmal glaube ich, es ist der Sinn des Lebens, uns mit seinem letzendlichen Verlust zu versöhnen, indem es uns zermürbt, uns beweist, auch wenn das eine Weile dauern kann, dass das Leben gar nicht so toll ist.

Cheer up! Death is round the corner.

This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't;

Be to, tas skausmas truko neilgai. Kaip min?jau, turiu stipr? savisaugos instinkt?. Man pavyko išstumti Veronik? iš širdies ir iš gyvenimo

He survived to tell the tale"—that's what people say, don't they? History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

La verdad no es amable. Lo descubrirás muy pronto cuando la vida te vapulee.

We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.

His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.