Quotes About Resilience

Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

You are never stronger, thought Samad as approached the doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.

There are so many different ways to be poor

he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?

I couldn't afford to be offended.

We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One

She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I'll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time

Only as an adult did I come to truly admire [my mother]...for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself

No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive

It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.

C]haracter occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly, too.

It struck Natalie that she was no longer crying or shaking, and that dread was the hardest emotion in the world to hold on to for more than a moment.

Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate

And now I found I couldn't stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I'd released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach.

There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion.

She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I

You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect

He wanted to be in the world and take what came with it, endings local and universal, full stops, periods, looks of injured disappointment and the everyday war. He liked the everyday war. He was taking that with fries. To go.

If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.