Quotes About Resilience

Things that other people do, or that happen to people you love, are some of the things you can't fight.

Dripping water pierces a stone.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. —William Butler Yeats

You're a tough guy, aren't you?" Tough was the biggest compliment my family offered. Nice was fine, smart was good, but tough was what we aimed for.

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.

What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.

Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.

Those who think a heart cannot break have led blessed and sheltered lives.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.

Do you know you can learn from pain?' But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future:

So now get up.' Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

You can't get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not… sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn't submerge you.

The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under glass

When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it--oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same." He pours himself some of the duke's present. "But in the last resort, you just kick it in.

Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.

We don't have to invite pain in, he thinks. It's waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is". - Thomas Cromwell - Wolf Hall

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.