Quotes About Resilience

poverty is the cause of many compromises.

Can I help it if my heart beats, if my hands go cold?

have spunks and do battle for yourself

I try, but they always see through me. The passages will never lead anywhere, the doors will always be shut.

I'd planned to die at thirty, and then I'd push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty, You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It's difficult. Too much trouble. I've thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, 'Damn it, I'll sit down. I can't go on. I'm tired of living here in the snow and ice.' So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.

I was thinking, 'I'm nineteen and I've got to go on living and living and living.

I took another road, past the old sugar works and the water wheel that had not turned for years. I went to parts of Coulibri that I had not seen, where there was no road, no path, no track. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think 'It's better than people.' Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin - once I saw a snake. All better than people. Better, better, better than people.

I got quite used to changing that cheque, because you can get used to anything. You think: I'll never do that; and you find yourself doing it.

Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world. Christophine to Antoinette

Just you touch me once. You'll soon see if I'm a damn coward like you are.

Shall I tell her that in spite of everything they did I died then? Shall I tell her what it feels like to be dead? It's not being sad, it's quite different. It's being nothing, feeling nothing. (...) it's like walking along a road in a fog, knowing that you have left everything behind you. But you don't want to go back; you've got to go on.

The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like sunset and I knew that I would never see Coulibri again. Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses, the rocking-chairs and the blue sofa, the jasmine and the honeysuckle, and the picture of the Miller's Daughter. When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.

Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.

Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die.

When trouble comes, close ranks

This was the affair which had ended quietly and decently, without fuss or scenes or hysteria. When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it.

Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.

It's at moment of misfortune that we remember we're all exiles.

Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.

If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.

Does the cosmos contain keys for opening my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking.

Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.

There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.

Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.