Quotes About Resilience

My deepest wounds and greatest strengths lie in my ability to see the potential for relationship in my life.

The history of women has been the history of a destructive kind of suffering, and I do not suggest moving further into that experience. My point is that walking away from pain altogether is equally as destructive. The debilitating suffering come when we do not allow ourselves to feel and work through our pain. Facing pain honestly and surviving gives us strength.

Pain shapes us, breaking us open so that we can reconfigure ourselves in a way that more deeply mirrors our authentic self.

A factory manager once tried to intimidate her. 'You can't win with that sari on,' he said. 'Why don't you change into a miniskirt?'fn5 Desai's reply took inspiration from Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India: 'I'll tell you something, manager. Mrs Gandhi wears a sari and she runs a country of 600 million people. You can't even run a little factory.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.

Mabel stops looking murderous and assumes an expression of severe truculence. How the hell, I imagine her thinking, am I supposed to catch things with this idiot in tow?

I learned that to harden your heart was not the same as not caring.

Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

ran into my old room, sat on the little bed and hugged my knees, pain worming around inside my chest like a thing with a million tiny teeth and claws.

There are actions we can take that seem impossible and pointless and yet they are entirely, and precisely, and absolutely required. We can exert pressure, we can speak up, we can march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world, standing with others, even if we don't believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don't believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren't White's, but I was running just the same.

Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And

There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning.

For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal.

Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won't die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff. I weighed the little twiggy sphere in my hand. Hardly there at all.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

It wasn't just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn't die.

I must not look the hawk in the eye. I must not punish the hawk, though it bates, and beats, and my hand is raw with pecks and my face stings from the blows of its bating wings. Hawks cannot be punished. They would die rather than submit. Patience is my only weapon. Patience. Derived from patior. Meaning to suffer. It is an ordeal. I shall triumph.

I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, 'reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost'.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes.