Quotes About Resilience

It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.

As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds.

There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.

Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it's stopped raining. Hope is what makes you believe he'll text you back. Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight... Hope is why you get out of bed in the morning, and why you dream at night. Hope is what makes us believe that things can only get better. Hope is what keeps us going.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself too..but I've never had that kind of courage.

God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle.

If he says jump, she doesn't even ask How high? She goes out and buys a pogo stick.

Jacob looks like a totally normal young man. He's clearly intelligent. But having his day disrupted probably makes him feel the same way I would if I was suddenly told to bungee off the top of the Sears Tower.

Wheather it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

I grew up in a household where we didn't really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you'd accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw.

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

You can have the best intentions, but the moment there's a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces.

I realize i do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary,any day. I believe that having something to hope for-even if its just a better tomorrow-is the most powerful drug on this planet.

Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

I don't get to rewrite my story; I just have to stumble to the end of it.