Quotes About Resilience

The tunnels comfort me, I guess, because they'te mine. They know what's inside me and they feel the way I do. Always. Like, you know, when you bomb a test but it's sunny outside? Well, that doesn't happen in the tunnels," she laughs. "They're always dark inside, like me, but inside, I'm like the tunnel—dark, winding, and twisting.

In such a life, he thinks, there is a truth. You can be so cold that you can't get colder, so wet you can't become wetter. You can feel so deeply that you are saturated, numb but still intensely alert—beyond fear—as if living a memory. Beyond living, he thinks. Surviving.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the patience not to strangle my mother-in-law, chop her into little pieces, and dump them down a sewer.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you'd read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because that's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.

They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong.

She wished she'd spent more time teaching her girls that women should forgive themselves, showing them how to take care of themselves with kindness. The world was hard enough, would beat them up enough without them adding to the pain.

You'll get through it, she said, leaving out the part I already knew-because you're a mother now. Because mothers don't have a choice.

Admitting you had a problem was the first step - everyone knew that - but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn't fix it

They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds.

She loved [her daughters]. More than that, she admired them. They would be better than she was: stronger and smarter, more capable and less afraid, and if the world displeased them, they would change it, cracking it open, reshaping it, instead of bending themselves to its demands.

She knew she'd be hearing that voice, those words, on an endless loop in her brain, maybe for the rest of her life.

You are fine, just the way you are... Bodies come in all shapes and sized. Don't let anyone make you feel any differently. I wanted to believe him, but by then, of course, the damage had been done.

The first time around, she'd done the surgeries, the radiation, the chemotherapy. She'd lost her hair, lost her appetite and her energy, lost her left breast and six months of her life.

Did any love ever feel as sweet as first love? Were we all just damaged goods now, battered cans in the grocery store sale bin, day old bread, marked down at the registered, hoping that someone would look past the obvious flaws and love us enough to take us home?

She hates me, Jo would think, but even that didn't hurt so much, because her father loved her, and she could carry his love, like a glowing coal in the center of her chest, feeling its warmth even in the face of her mother's fury.

Try and fail and try again.

You try, and fail, and try again, and fail again.

How could I live a life where the person who'd built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who'd seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?

We lose ourselves," she repeated, forming each word with care, "but we find our way back." Wasn't that the story of her life?

Diana buried her face in her hands, because, as Michael undoubtedly suspected, the answer was all the time. It was her biggest fear—that her rapist hadn't stopped with her, that, to the contrary, she'd been the first, in a line, maybe a long one.

Things happen, and you can't make them un-happen. You don't get do-overs, you can't roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing that does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.

First of all, it's life. You don't win.

Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can and you keep going.