Quotes About Resilience

We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.

I am too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile.

Some days he climbed over the foothills of indifference to see the landscape of his life and future for what it was: mappable, traversable, achievable.

One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

It only takes one person, one small act of stepping from the dark to the light.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard. It shifts and our cities fall; it sighs and the coasts are overtaken.

There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana

Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we?

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul.

The truth is that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more. Or perhaps it's that I survived to do more. Dorsetta is married, a mother of three, and manages a restaurant; she does more than hang in there. I have a low opinion of this expression, Hang in there.

What he had was a sense that few things mattered much. That few people are to be feared. And so he now faced all such situations with a sense of exhausted resolve, and he dealt with everything head-on.

There would be a time when the world created people stronger than them. When all of this got worked out. But until then there would be women and men like Hanne and Alan, who were imperfect and had no path toward perfection.

So this is how they lived. For some time Theo, like a tree living in the shadow of taller trees, found a way to live off reflected light.

The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.

I will reach upward. I will attempt to do better. I will not be a burden upon those who have helped me too much already. I will always be grateful for what pleasures I have enjoyed, what joys I have yet to experience. I will take opportunities as they come, but at the same time, I will not trust so easily. I will look at who is at the door before opening it. I will try to be fierce. I will argue when necessary. I will be willing to fight.

Be Strong, Be brave, Be True. Endure

To struggle is to strengthen my faith, my hope and my belief in humanity.

This book is a form of struggle, and it keeps my spirit alive to struggle.

At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasn't one of those days.

Now create in your mind the best of days, and memorize these details, place this day center in your mind, and when you are the most frightened, bring forth this day and place yourself within it.

I survived long enough to remember saying yes to life and "no" or at least "slow down" to a slow death.