Quotes About Resilience

When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.

My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. He'd come home from work

And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

all of us were clinging to a world already gone.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.

White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power.

You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here.

I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. 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.

Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.

The trick in life is learning how to deal with it.

Poverty is only ennobling, it is implied, if one has escaped it.

Dolly is both Cinderella and her fairy godmother, and she has no need for a Prince Charming.

School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.

Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them? It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark. But black wells only yield black water.

But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order . . ." "And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work." "It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?" He

Her gingerbread keeps and keeps. It outlasts all daintier gifts. Flowers wilt and shed mottled petals, mold blooms greenish-white on chocolate truffles, and Harriet's gingerbread hunkers down in its tin, no more attractive than the day it arrived, but no more repellent either.

i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT'S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i]

I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I'd break something inside me.

she was herself entire, and knew she could not be consumed.

Her heart's breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off.

If you're about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something vicious beforehand.

Miranda waited, then said, 'But what will I do for a whole year?' Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Get better. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to health filled her with black sand.

My head got so heavy, it sank down into my chest. So say whatever it is you think you've got to say, St. John. That you're not in love with me. That you need to be alone. Say it. I'm not going to like it, no, I won't like it at all. But I'll be all right.

If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.