Quotes About Resilience

Noam held a storm in his hands, and he couldn't feel a thing.

For coffee-stained girls in libraries.

The boy in this mirror was steel and frost and a bloodied knife. And he wasn't afraid of anything.

But I think I understand now what Shackleton said yesterday, how hero is not always doing something grand. It's when things get so bad, and you keep on anyway.

The key to living in a way that fat, broke & lonely can't touch is to get back i the game as soon as you realize you're out of it. This doesn't come from kicks and phases. It arises from inserting, one at a time, features of the life you want into the life you've got. When you see that you've fallen into an old pattern, get back to the new one. Otherwise you'll be caught up in a soap opera with only one plot

You never know what a man -- or a woman -- has inside: how much grit, how much courage, how much willingness to change. When someone draws on those qualities, you're looking at a person of substance. And power. And promise. This world needs more of those.

In a world where men have always been in charge, it was hard for women to break through. But Ka'ahumanu was different. She was born to rule (Kneubuhl 27)

One last Rule of Life: When your heart is cracked open with grief and sorrow, look for that soft light somewhere you don't expect to find it. Trust it. Love makes heroes of us all.

I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.

We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit.

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

I quietly quaffed my cognac, discreetly admiring Lana's legs. Longer than the Bible and a hell of a lot more fun, they stretched forever, like an Indian yogi or an American highway shimmering through the Great Plains or the southwestern desert. Her legs demanded to be looked at and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer.

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you're floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.

I laughed, even though inside me the little dog of my soul was sitting at attention, nose and ears to the wind.

This was what few people realize—it's hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse.

Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?

We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

You tried to play their game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

A person's strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it.

In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I