Quotes About Resilience

I ain't going to talk to you until I am blue in the face trying to make you change. I'm going to tell you what's on my mind and hope you get it and I'm going to move on. That's what we have to do sometimes--move on. Try to help others, extend your hand, and then help the next. If they don't want to accept it, keep moving on. Don't let them discourage you. Never stop doing what you're doing because of somebody else's unwillingness to learn.

Root People may be hard to find because they're not trying to be seen. They do their work underground. But quietly and without fanfare, they provide help and support and nourishment. They are happy when I thrive.

Be aware of the darkness but your focus should always be the light.

It ain't what people call you. It's what you answer to.

The will to live is as strong as the will to love and be loved.

God has not given us a spirit of fear.

The joy of The Lord really is strength.

This book is to help you understand that life is sometimes hard, and you have to laugh your way through it.

Half the time, the very thing you think that's going to destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about. My advice to anybody with skeletons is dust them off every now and then—as long as your closet ain't full of them. It's not good to have more than two or three.

But what I found out, the longer you sit there and feel bad about yourself, the longer you're going to stay depressed.

The first thing you do to get over your depression is open up the curtains, put on some good music, take you a shower, get up, put on a good face, and open the door and go out and see the world. Everything that's kicking you, kick it back.

I started writing to deal with my childhood abuse and to help me get over it. I began putting my thoughts on paper because I saw a show on Oprah where she said it was "cathartic" to write things down. Being from a substandard public school system, I didn't even know what "cathartic" meant. I had to look it up. So I started writing, but I didn't

Think about yourself as a baby eagle leaving a comfortable nest. If things start becoming difficult while you're taking flight, don't be afraid. Spread your wings and fly. God's got you.

The truth is I had to imagine myself in a better place," I explained. "Because sometimes the nights got so cold and the days

so hard, if I didn't dream of better times, I wouldn't have made it.

The conviction that you can change your life starts with your own thinking. If you're going through dark times and it feels as if there's not enough breath and light in your soul to keep you moving higher, you need to believe that now is the time to break through. The seed of change starts as a thought in your own mind. You begin by believing it.

When I was twenty years old and putting on my first play in Birmingham, Alabama, I had to use my mother's credit card to rent a van to get there. The bill was around three hundred dollars. But the show didn't make any money, and when I came home I had to tell her I couldn't pay for the rental.

Everybody is dealt a different hand, but you have to do what you have with your hand.

MY CHILDHOOD WAS A STORY of discouragement, belittlement, and unthinkable abuse, and yet I rose above. There was no way I could have found any kind of happiness, hope, or vision if my mother, Maxine, and my aunt Mae hadn't shown

say "adopted" because my father, Emmitt, was abandoned and discovered in a drainage canal at the age of two. He was taken to Mae so that she could raise him.

But I couldn't get the preacher's words out of my head: "If you pray, God will see you through it. He'll answer your prayers.

get through the spring, summer, and autumn living paycheck to paycheck, but during the chilly months of winter, the money ran out and I couldn't pay my rent. The unthinkable happened. I became homeless. I'd sleep in my car and try to keep warm by running the heater or wrapping myself in a quilt Aunt Mae had given me. If I had some cash, I'd crash in a pay-by-the-week hotel room.

Sometimes in life, son, when you pray and you've said and done all you can,

My soul-filled experiences have taught me to embrace disappointments, knowing