Quotes About Resilience

You always wanted calm seas. You used to claim you got along with everyone, that you kept to yourself, that you needed nothing from no one. But one can't ask the sea to never swell into rage. And you asked a great deal from me.

Each revelation was devastating. Everything she said. And yet, even as my life shattered in pieces, I felt as if I were finally coming up for air.

And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.

It's easier to surrender to confinement.

People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can't shoot back.

She'd told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother's absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she'd gone.

Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. "Gogol

Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer.

Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain.

She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipate it against her will.

She cries as she feeds him, and as she pats him to sleep, and as he cries between sleeping and feeding. She cries after the mailman's visit because there are no letters from Calcutta. She cries when she calls Ashoke at his department and he does not answer. One day she cries when she goes to the kitchen to make dinner and discovers that they've run out of rice.

Wanneer je als mens sterk geworteld bent, zoals mijn ouders dat waren, kan migratie werken als een zaag en een levenslang trauma veroorzaken. Ik ben meer als de waterplanten in het moerasland, het lowland dat ik in mijn boek beschrijf. Mijn wortels hebben geleerd in het water te dwarrelen, beweeglijk te zijn. Migratie betekent voor mij geen ontworteling meer.

But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer.

He remembered himself sitting naked on one side of the mattress, in a room he was suddenly aware he was never again to see. He had not argued; in the wake of his shame, he became strangely efficient and agreeable, with her, with everyone.

In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone.

Both her parents came from humble backgrounds; botht heir grandmothers had given up the gold on their arms to put roofs over their families' heads and food on their plates. This mentality, as tiresome as it sometimes felt, reassured Sudha, for it was something her parents understood and respected about each other, and she suspected it was the glue that held them together.

And she refused to go to that miserable place that Julian had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.

Stretched to the breaking point by all that now stood between them, but at the same time refusing to break.

There had been a brittle quality to her, something unyielding, a young person who carried about her a premonition of old age.

Three times a day, for the next three days, until they've buried my friend's father, until they come back, the dog and I make the same rounds. I grow fond of the animal, of his ears, always alert, and of his careful gait, his determined muzzle.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It's the system that functions in the pinches that survive

Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn't work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won't work for you either.

The brave man uses wrath for his own act, above all in attack, 'for it is peculiar to wrath to pounce upon evil. Thus fortitude and wrath work directly upon each other.