Quotes About Resilience

I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It's remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I'd been slammed into a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist-show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election.

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. Sometime me cry alone at night. That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.

Bitch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right. We'll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.

Back off, world. It's time for me to be good to me.

A person needed savings in order to move, but more than that he needed gumption.

What you call your personality, you know?—it's not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

September 12, 2001 Paris Last night on TV I watched people jump from the windows of the World Trade Center.

And I'm here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it's really not that bad.

When shit brings you down, just say 'fuck it,' and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.")

The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.

When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there's a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.

One day she'd throw a dish at you, and the next she'd create a mosaic made of the shards.

I read yesterday that when starved for food, the humpback cricket will chew off its own legs. If they regenerated this might be a half-decent idea, but they don't. So it eats its legs, and, unable to escape danger, it promptly gets eaten itself. That so seems like something I would do.

Why aren't you stronger? I wanted to ask. I mean, really. Can't you just try harder? Of course, I was drunk too, so what could I say?

Since receiving my last phone bill I have taken to fastening the telephone to its cradle, using some of the threaded packing tape stolen from what used to be my job. In the rare event of an incoming daytime call I can always grab a knife or scissors, but luckily the task appears to be too strenuous during my ever increasing personal mystery hours. Another problem solved with simplicity and grace.

When shit brings you down, just say 'fuck it,' and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.

Jews in concentration camps had shaved heads and tattoos. You'd think the anti-Semites would go for a different look.

My Yiayiá was exactly the sort of friend I'd liked as an adult, someone with an endless supply of hard-luck stories and no desire to ever write a book.

As for the ewe, she was still in meditation, her eyes clamped shut, repeating the code of thieves and charlatans and those who are good to themselves the world over. I have to do what I have to do, she said. I have to do what I have to do.

Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I've been hoisting for the past sixty years.

No one had a houseful of servants or a trained proboscis monkey, yet we'd turned out OK, hadn't we?

we all make mistakes, but if you don't learn quickly enough, you'll not survive in this sport.

One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that "tortured" souls sometimes produce great work.