Quotes About Resilience

you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

Before I found out for myself, I might have imagined that in the aftermath of personal apocalypse, the little bothers of life would effectively vanish. But it's not true. You still feel chills, you still despair when a package is lost in the mail, and you still feel irked to discover you were shortchanged at Starbucks.

And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.

If we've learnt anything in our practice of medicine," Kay whispered, "it's that there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there's no limit to suffering. So they can always make our lives worse.

But I've never met anybody whose life has taken a sudden turn for the worse who thought a reversal of fortune was just what they had coming to them.

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.

People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.

Still, I look down, and the grass is so green, I cannot understand how it does not wither and die with sorrow. ~Song of the Sparrow

My sparrow, she flickers and wakes and sings and sings.

I am Elaine dughter of Barnard of Ascolat. Motherless. Sisterless. I sing these words to you now, because the point of light grows smaller ever smaller now, ever more distant now. And with this song, I pray I may push back the tides of war and death. So, I sing these words that this light, this tiny ray of light and hope may live on. I dare not hope that I may live on too.

I am in a sun-filled tent, and my father's face, wrinkled, drawn, and pinched with worry, grows clear. He kneels beside my head, and as I look at him and ask, disbelievingly, I live? a smile widens, smoothing the creases at his brow and mouth... Tristan sits beside Lavain, his golden eyes so filled with fear, his face haggard and fraught with shadows. Elaine, he breathes, thank God.

No way through but through...Do the next thing, Gabriella, and then the next, and then the next.

You see, counselors, teachers, and various organizations may all agree with you that you are handicapped, but God never will. He loves giving you the opportunity to face what you fear, because when you face what you fear you become fearless.

Lovely One, if you dare to dream, you must be brave enough to fight.

I believe that the attacks on your life have much more to do with who you might be in the future than who you have been in the past.

We are meek in the way we follow and fierce in the way we fight. In this manner, gentle and fierce meet and are comfortable.

Outward pressure is always an opportunity to be inwardly transformed.

My mother, brave woman, lost her whole family when she decided to marry a black man in the '60s. When the marriage fell apart, she had to come back to her family.

You can't go through life striking out at people who hurt or scare you. All that does is show them that you're weak. It tells them that they've wounded you, and a strong woman never shows her wounds unless it serves a purpose.

Don't ever scare me like that again, swinging on the rope." "I won't. I'll find a new way," she teased.

Some hopes were better nurtured in private, where the words of others could not harm them, and where disappointment could be borne free of the pitying gaze of friends.

When girls come into my office in a panic...and I can tell that they they're just a wreck, I get out my glitter jar and I do this." She picked up the jar and shook it fiercely the way one shakes a snow globe. The placid water immediately became a sparkling purple tempest. "And then I say to the girl, 'Right now, this is what it's like in your brain. So first, let's settle your glitter.

The most successful people I know do their best work under any conditions, for anyone.