Quotes About Resilience

a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching. "Poor little thing," he said, petting it with his large hands. "Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it's alive, but it's much too heavy to fly." The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry, clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. "It's always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.

It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.

A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she'd known it for a while, but it was the first time she'd admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness—she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.

There must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them, something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed but the scar wouldn't fade, not quite.

he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.

trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. The

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

There were things he'd been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren't quite as scary as he first thought.

He'd thought he'd known what his future looked like, but he'd been mistaken. His life would be something else now. He was starting over, only he didn't think he had the strength to start over. He didn't know if he could stand up.

was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—he

It was too easy, and he'd had enough of doing things the easy way.

Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.

The situation wasn't ideal. But it was what she had to work with, so she would work with it. She was a tough one,

She'd been in math classes with Quentin since they were ten years old, and anything he could do she could do just as well, backward and in high heels if necessary.

it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world–he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.

The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you'd fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.

She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future,

What have people ever done for me? People don't want my help. People called me a faggot and threw me in a Dumpster at recess when I was in fifth grade because my pants were pressed." "Well,

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer.

But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect. To