Quotes About Resilience

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself.

some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

En épocas difíciles, me habían dicho desde niña, lee, aprende, prepárate, recurre a la literatura.

I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm.

Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Bringing him back" had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. "Seeing it clearly" did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.           I

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After

Les gens qui ont perdu quelqu'un ont un air particulier, que seuls peut-être ceux qui l'ont décelé sur leur propre visage peuvent reconnaître. Je l'ai remarqué sur mon visage et je le remarque à présent sur d'autres. C'est un air d'extrême vulnérabilité, une nudité, une béance.

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

Seuls ceux qui survivent à une mort se retrouvent véritablement seuls. Les liens qui constituaient leur existence - les plus profonds comme les plus insignifiants en apparence - ont tous disparu.

Only the survivors of a death and truly left alone

Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose," one said. The injured man made no response, nor could he, since he had a trach.

Il dolore non tiene le distanze. Il dolore arriva a ondate, parossismi, ansie improvvise che ti tagliano le gambe e ti accecano e cancellano la quotidianità della vita.

Nei momenti difficili, mi era stato insegnato fin dall'infanzia, leggi, impara, datti da fare, rivolgiti alla letteratura. Essere informati significava non perdere il controllo.

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded by happiness.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

In a time of disaster you could baste newspapers to both sides of a cotton blanket and end up with a warm quilt. She knew a lot of things about disaster. She could manage.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.