Quotes About Resilience

Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.

I hadn't been paying much 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.

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you are young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul.

What I do know is that wondering why you survived don't help you survive.

People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

Mom and Dad liked to make a big point about never surrendering to fear or to prejudice or to the narrow-minded conformist sticks-in-the-mud who tried to tell everyone else what was proper.

What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

I told Mom that maybe I had made a terrible mistake, but mom said sometimes you have to get sicker before you can get better.

From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.

She knew how to get by on next to nothing.

Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. "Well, there you go", she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. "If you don't think you're hurt, then you aren't", she said. "So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you're stronger then that", she went back to her crossword puzzle.

I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes. • • •

Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he'd played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over?

When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle.

And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it.

I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?

We're becoming a nation of sissies.

You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies.

Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I'd be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom's, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some

Just remember," Mom said after examining the blisters, "what doesn't kill you will make you stronger." "If that was true, I'd be Hercules by now," Lori said.

we fought a lot in welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; Maybe it was because life there was hard and it made the people hard...maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids.

Dad said High Lonesome, as the area was known, wasn't a place for the soft of head or the weak of heart, and he said that was why he and I made out just fine there, because we were both tough nuts.