Quotes About Resilience

Trustin' a woman is like walkin' in California," Coydog would say. "You know there's bound to be a quake sometimes but you just keep on walkin' anyways. What else could you do?

That would be like me tellin' a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There's gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, [...], there might even be men with guns.

I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.

Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in LA had to believe that there was a chance to thrive. Living in Southern California was like waking up in a children's book titled Would Be If I Could Be.

You can't fight with death, all you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don't fall out from under you.

The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.

The first thing a black man and a poor man learns is that trouble is all he's got so that's what he has to work with.

You know, the undersized genius had said, ain't no way in the world that black folks could'a done enough bad to call all them centuries'a pain down on our heads.

Yeah. If you've never been knocked down, then you've never been in a fight.

A man must support his own weight, no matter how much money or power he has; that is the law of gravity.

These were people who faced their fears and created the world as they moved through it.

You don't have to be smart to be tough-minded. As a matter of fact, the combination of stupidity and silence might be the greatest weapon in the history of our species.

I wore death on my shoulder like a superheroes cape, but that didn't matter. I was going to fight the good fight and, win or lose, I'd be counted as a man who struggled against his own fate.

I always talk about down home like it really was home. Like everybody who looked like me and talked like me really cared about me. I knew that life was hard, but I hoped that if someone stole from me it would be because they were hungry and needed it. But some people will tear you down just to see you fall. They'll do it even if your loss is their own.

Though assailed by hopelessness I was not afraid.

Every time he slammed his body against the wire fence the jay started as if he were about to fly off, but he didn't. He just kept staring down into those deadly jaws, mesmerized by the spectacle there.

You know love is true when it survives the devastation it causes.

He once told me that they'd have to wake him for his execution because "the Mouse ain't gonna miss his rest.

Jackson couldn't fly straight down if you threw him off a cliff.

America was changing at a snail's pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once.

No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow's blows. The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting. —ADMIRAL ERNEST J. KING, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, 1942

As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, "the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left."20

Then Nimitz, being Nimitz, posted the usual watches and did the only thing that made sense to him. "On that black night somewhere in the Philippines," he later recalled, "the advice of my grandfather returned to me: 'Don't worry about things over which you have no control.' So I set up a cot on deck and went to sleep.

No word of commiseration can make a burden feel one feather's weight lighter to the slave who must carry it.