Quotes About Resilience

I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.

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. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

You can change everything about yourself - your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history - but you can't change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.

I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.

Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit.

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floot is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

I've thought of killing myself many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.

I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

But as I try and understand how life works--and why some people cope better than others with adversity--I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream...

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.

It is going dark. There are bombs exploding. Alice is losing patience. She throws down the map and shouts at Gertrude: 'THIS IS THE WRONG ROAD.' Gertrude drives on. She says, 'Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.

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

If you can't survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.

I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.

No man believes what he does not feel to be true. I should like to unbelieve myself. I sleep at night and wake in the morning hoping to be gone. it never happens. One knee forward, one knee bent, I bear the world.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. The

He had the dog on a lead and he was still managing to be a boy with a dog and the dog was still managing to be a dog with a boy because not even a bomb gets to wipe out everything

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 and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.