Quotes About Resilience

As I travel the country for away games, I meet kids fighting cancer in almost every city. They visit the ballpark, and I invite them onto the field so we can chat and then watch the game.

I used to visit kids with cancer all the time. Now I'm in the club. I understand what's happening to these little kids with brain cancer, and I ask myself, 'How do they make it through the day?' So you see a little 5-year-old and you say, 'If she can do it, I can suck it up.'

My guitar survived Kosovo, then I went to visit a record company back in London and fell off my motorbike with it on my back, smashing it to bits. I was travelling at two miles per hour.

George W. Bush was good as his word. He visited the Gulf states 17 times; went 13 times to New Orleans. Laura Bush made 24 trips. Bush saw that $126 billion in aid was sent to the Gulf's residents, as some members of his own party in Congress balked.

I submitted videos and applications to talent agencies and TV shows; I drove to Vegas and visited agents. I was on 'America's Got Talent'; I played for free at venues in attempts to be 'found' and yet all the experts in the entertainment industry told me that what I did was not marketable and that I had to join a group or do more traditional music.

When I was born, my parents - my mother especially - couldn't come to terms with that fact that they had another baby girl. I know these stories in detail because every time a guest visited, or there was a gathering, they repeated this story in front of me that how I was the unwanted child.

I was without my own place for nearly two years. It's such a cliche to be a homeless musician in New York, but luckily, I had amazing friends who let me stay with them. I visited my parents a lot. It's not like I was sleeping in my car, though I might have done that once... But it was by choice!

Ever since a therapy dog visited me in the hospital during my first cycle of chemotherapy in May 2011, I became fixated on the idea of having a dog of my own one day.

Cooking requires time, effort and fuel: increasing numbers of people I've visited can't even afford to turn on the kettle for a cup of tea as they eke out every penny to feed their extortionate gas and electric meters.

I can bear my own sorrows, but the sorrows arising from the calamities visiting Islam and Muslims have crushed me. I feel each blow delivered to the Muslim world as delivered first to my own heart.

In 2004, I was visiting my cousins in San Francisco and we were in a restaurant talking in Punjabi. We suddenly saw heads turn. And one of the Americans at the restaurant abused us and called my cousins, 'turban-headed Osamas.' That strengthened my resolve to make a film that highlights the issue.

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.

When I did small films like Lily and Buenos Vista, everyone thought my career would be ruined.

I was living with my mom in a tiny apartment in Chula Vista, near Third and H Street behind the 7-Eleven. It was crazy to be on the phone with Stevie Wonder. I felt like a meteor hit our apartment!

When I started, I knew I didn't fit any visual that anyone was going to lie down and take their clothes off about. Work doesn't come to me; I go out and look for it.

Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

I would think about the outcome. Visualize sometimes. Because it never comes out the way you want it to. Fight the way I know how to fight. Whatever comes up, comes up.

I'm not giving in to anyone else's idea of how I ought to feel and look at 70. 'Retirement' is not a word I can even visualize. I retire when I go to bed!

There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength.

You know, sometimes I feel well and vital in the world, and sometimes I just feel so distressed I want to pull my hair out by the roots.

I think it is vital to fight to do something you want to do despite not gaining your community's or your friends' approval.

Because travel has always been such a vital part of myself and so essential to who I am, I have made the decision to continue to put myself back out into the world. And that's not an easy decision to make.

Anything that keeps me off balance is vital.

I don't need to be liked, but I need to be vital - on set or on stage - and I think that probably would be my advice: Stay vital. It's about saying 'no' and asking the tough questions and believing in yourself when no one else will, but you have to know the rules to break them.