Quotes About Resilience

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

There is no cure except to live the hell out of our lives, to take it apart, to put it back together, to dig it all up, and then fill the hole. To help ourselves and one another to the best of our abilities. To believe everything entirely, while also calling bullshit for what it is.

Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.

I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

And so I walked on.

I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn't walk even one more step. And then I ran.

Bravery is acknowledging your fear and doing it anyway.

It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.

Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

Cultivate an understanding that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.

A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn't let it define your life.

but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.

I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there. It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

What if you allowed your God to exist in he simple words of compassion others offer you? ... What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through our window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering more than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve.

Transformation doesn't ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that's already inside of you. You only have to bloom.

Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was about to happen. But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I'd realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really -- all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.

Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.