Quotes About Resilience

How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?

underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage.

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever--you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her. You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus.

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to the stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip.

Patricia Williams has pointed out in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: "The cold game of equality staring makes me feel like a thin sheet of glass…. I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process." Interviewed

Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term--John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up. What rises up within, between us? What comes up because we are the history within us?

I wasn't really eight anymore. The day you know danger and fear, and know that you are alone, is the day you grow, if not up, then old.

al corazón no se le dan órdenes, decía, el corazón se rompe, y si se le dice que no se rompa se rompe igualmente, como el mío...

I'll end up believing, like him, that everything is war and every mark a scar. She ran a finger lightly over the blade of a sword temporarily hung on the wall; the line it left on her skin, though distinct, quickly vanished.

Native peoples imbibed all of the vices of U.S. citizens, they claimed, while slaves absorbed their virtues.

The greatest glory never comes from winning, but from rising each time you fall.

The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.

Never grow a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

Learn to bear bravely changes of fortune.

Fingernails filling with silt, scraping the sculpted...

But if you have a solid walk with the Lord, then you won't fear that failure.

Markets rebounded quickly from morning jitters after the London Thursday terrorist bombing.

We must learn how to not allow the enemy to have a handhold of our joy and our peace.