Quotes About Resilience

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's.

What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things-an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher.

keeps Mexico ticking over

But hope and determination and a willingness to take risks are not enough to overcome the curse of bad government or the hostility of the everyday, the warding off of evil.

Now a museum, it was filled with Frida's startling paintings and also many of Diego's, family photographs and paraphernalia, such as the corsets and leg braces that the wounded (thirty operations, including an amputated leg) Frida had worn. Out of the small, stifling rooms, the courtyard was a suburban jungle of tamed vines and trimmed trees, the whole house a work of art, a kind of habitable sculpture.

The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. 'Oh, well, mustn't grumble!

All the crockery in China had been smashed – flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which China was famous. All the blood-stained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors' portraits had been destroyed. All the bodies had been buried. It was a country of bare rooms and empty shelves, like this apartment

When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.

This protest, the rebellion, was a tonic.

I turned seventy in the Kalahari Desert and defended myself against oafs in the stink and misery of northern Angola. All these trips, ten of them, became books.

the predominating characteristic of the Chinese was stoicism

on my trip whenever I felt obstructed or low, I thought of this valiant woman, and moved on.

Many Mexicans I met—working in hotels, restaurants, and shops, driving taxis—had held jobs in the States and been thrown out.

There are four here." And she shrugged. "They don't bother me." Ellos no me molestan. "They fight with each other," Miguel had told me on the bus, "and with the police.

On that first visit, Nogales seemed to me a border town trying to save itself, and I thought succeeding. Walking in the city, I was struck by the distinct air of foreignness mingled with a pleasing ordinariness

A woman in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards-she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the Bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.

a city of poor housing and low spirits, of people living in the hovels Mexicans call jacales—workers' quarters, like plantation housing—and that none of the workers in the Oster factory had in their shack one of the coffee machines they toiled to make.

My secret was sad, but at least it was my secret; it was something to hold on to.

cling to—they have little else to cling to.

If we do not test ourselves daily, in seemingly small ways, our spiritual selves will never build the strength we will need when life's major trials are presented.

Yes, my dear," she said out loud to herself, "you took quite a fall." And felt pure amazement at the long time it had taken before she had finally found again the ground.

If optimism is the highest form of courage -- as I am beginning to believe it is -- then these students are all heroes.

The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting.

Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.