Quotes About Resilience

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

She was sorry to have hurt her, but she wanted them all to leave her alone, let her keep it together. Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

I'd seen a couple of Claire's movies now. She was transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I'd spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn't drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside?

This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.

I'd spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn't drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.

Her body felt like it'd been beaten with a hose. This must be what it felt like to get old. It wasn't that your body fell apart from living so long. It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you'd be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them again.

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.

At times like this I surprise myself, how I've managed to create something of a life on this foggy shore out of the broken pieces of myself, scavenged from the sea like flotsam. Or is it jetsam…it irks me not to know the difference.

I suppose they cannot imagine what a person might be called upon to endure, when a line of poetry can mean the difference between strength and despair.

It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you'd be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them ever again

Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.

Nature was always there, no matter what.

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.

Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

There was power in me now, where there had been none.

I learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or out on my back, I was insoluble, like same in water. Stir me up, I always rest on the bottom

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.

Don't tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they're not beating you, consider yourself lucky.

Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It

It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn't survive.