Quotes About Resilience

The first thing I did was lock myself in the bathroom and unwind my binders. I was moist and sour from adrenaline and fear sweat and I felt like I would die if I didn't rinse off. There was no soap and the rusty, lukewarm water dribbled out of the showerhead like blood from the wrist of a reluctant suicide. Still, it was better than nothing.

Eventually, morning came instead of bad guys. That was the thing about mornings. No matter how fucked up your life got, how deep and black your despair, how sure you were that you just couldn't take another second of this shit, morning just kept on coming. Over and over. Morning didn't give a damn about your little drama.

She had to do something. Anything. She had to focus, think, fight. She wasn't anybody's point to prove. She was fucking Batgirl. Her body was broken and her mind jagged and fractured by trauma, but she was still alive, and she wasn't going down without a fight.

Coldness in everything. It comes from a long way off; it gets into everything. One must get out of the way before it reaches the core. If it does that, one won't feel even the coldness any more. Do you see what I mean?

In the middle of a war you think of nothing but how it will end. And put off living. When large numbers of people do that, it creates a vacuum within us which the war flows in to fill.

Manfred sapeva assai bene che esiste una sorta di bravura che lascia del tutto fredda la persona in gamba.

In any case, he made me think the unheard-of: The world could go on after our destruction.

dem Leben ins Gesicht zu sehen, älter und doch nicht härter zu werden." (33)

Und in mir wurde gekämpft, das merkte ich wohl. Zwei Gegner auf Leben und Tod hatten sich die erstorbne Leidenschaft meiner Seele zum Kampflplatz gewählt. Nur der Wahnsinn schützte mich vor dem unerträglichen Schmerz, den die beiden mir sonst zugefügt hätten. So hielt ich am Wahnsinn fest, er an mir.

Kleist erinnert sich, daß der Schmerz ihm Geständnisse erpreßt hat, Versuche, den Schmerz zu beschreiben. Das erträgt kein Mensch lange, Doktor. Einmal muß es nachlassen oder mich töten.

Wo ein Messer einmal tief ins Fleisch geschnitten hat, tut die Berührung durch eine Feder weh.

Sie sagt, nach ihrer Beobachtung gehöre zum Leben der Frauen mehr Mut als zu dem der Männer. Wenn sie von einer Frau höre, die diesen Mut aufbringe, verlange es sie danach, mit ihr bekannt zu sein. Es sei nämlich dahin gekommen, daß die Frauen, auch über Entfernungen hinweg, einander stützen müßten, da die Männer nicht mehr dazu imstande seien.

Ich habe nicht gewußt, was ein Mensch erträgt. Nun sitze ich da und muß mir sagen, auf dieser Fähigkeit, Unerträgliches zu ertragen und weiterzuleben, weiter zu tun, was zu tun man gewöhnt ist, auf dieser unheimlichen Fähigkeit beruht der Bestand des Menschengeschlechts.

Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.

the art of survival is a story that never ends

Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.

So long as the man with ambition is a failure, the world will tell him to let go of his ideal; but when his ambition is realized, the world will praise him for the persistence and the determination that he manifested during his dark hours, and everybody will point to his life as an example for coming generations. This is invariably the rule. Therefore pay no attention to what the world says when you are down. Be determined to get up, to reach the highest goal you have in view, and you will.

The habit of giving up when the present task is half finished and try something else is one of the chief causes of failure.

Never permit circumstances to change your plans, but give so much character to your plans that they will change circumstances. Give so much character to the current of your work that all things will be drawn into that current, and that which at first was but a tiny rivulet, will thus be swelled into a mighty, majestic stream.

But it seemed like the more we advanced, the more the future looked impossible, making us return to the more radical times in the past.

Der Baum wird nie an gebrochenem Herzen sterben und das Gras nie seinen Verstand verlieren. Von außen droht ihnen jede mögliche Gefahr, von innen her aber sind sie gefeit. Sie fallen sich nicht selbst in den Rücken, wie der Mensch mit seinem Geist und ersparen uns damit das wiederholte Schauspiel unseres eigenen zweideutigen Lebens.

It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

When all else is lost, the future still remains.