Quotes About Resilience

But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.

We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs.

Interesting people always have a past.

I hadn't been paying attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

Things usually work out in the end. What if they don't? That just means you haven't gotten to the end yet.

The other kids threw bars of soap at her, pushed one another into her path and wrote graffiti about her on the bathroom walls. In return, she cursed them out in Latin.

They say things will work out in the end. What if they don't? Then you haven't come to the end.

Your body knows how to fall.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?