Quotes About Resilience

cats swore that they had pretended to be domesticated to protect themselves—any cat who lived with a human did so under duress, and all cats escaped whenever they could.

Dejé de ser la intermediaria entre el capataz y los peones, la responsable de todo. La mujer que acababa el día hecha jirones y que era remendada durante la noche con el único propósito de poder ser despedazada de nuevo a la mañana siguiente.

Opa used to tease her. He would open her mouth and look at her teeth, like she was a horse. Then he would say, 'Callie, you are more than ten and less than a hundred.' Well, she was a poor girl, in the end.

Once again, the curious thing was how strange and forceful the world was, how it battered and clanged and could not be withstood, and yet some individuals withstood it while others did not.

if Monterey had taught her anything, it was to make the best of things. Every ship that sailed into the bay had to do what the winds demanded, whatever the captain's plans might be.

Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth.

A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet.

What do you do with everything that is cut away? she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life...

And the odd thing was, she was beautiful then. It was her awakening, her... recovery that made her beautiful. After that she just shone.

I looked back over that field, and all across it you could see spider webs. This was quite amazing to me as I had just ploughed the whole field that day. A testimonial to the spiders' indestructability, I'd say.

fierce lonely

Someday, Joseph said to his granddaughter, someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won't be able to prevent yourself; that's just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.

Wanting to die and dying, she found were two separate things.

Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself. There will be times when he will surround you with walls of darkness. But remember always that your soul is secure to you, for your soul is entire, and that he cannot enter your soul, for your soul is part of God.

Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.

Live, he whispered. For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.

The hard bed, the stool beside it, the stark cross on the wall, each cast shadows. Only the man in the bed seemed shadowless. He was the stillest thing in the room.

Could it be that humans had an infinite capacity to make themselves at home in the direst of situations? Or did one just adjust expectations downward, so as to be able to get through each day?

People were dying around us, of starvation, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, typhoid, deportation, influenza, heartbreak. Their lungs were filling up because of the cold. They were being shot for walking too quickly, staring too hard, not answering questions fast enough or answering too fast, or just because they wore the yellow star. To die was easy. To live was harder. Papa said to us, "We have chosen the more difficult path, that of life. Now we must walk it." We walked.

Beauty Sleep Wake up, princess, time to rise. Open up your dreamy eyes. Never mind the prince or kiss. By no means were you raised for this. Take the plot back from the witch. Kick her spindle in the ditch!

At least Em, long-suffering as she was, tried to give the child a bit of her heart, which - after all those years of living with Henry on that old gray farm in the middle of the gray prairie - was as dried up as an old pea. She tried, but she wasn't much good at it. It was a bit like trying to water a budding flower in the middle of a dry Kansas summer with a watering can poked through with holes.

Sometimes living takes more courage than dying

Laughter in the face of certain death? It is the very definition of the Hero, said the White Queen. The Jabberwock knew it and therefore could no longer move against you.