Quotes About Resilience

Jake's father, Doc Polson, had tended to hundreds of scraped knees and bumped heads. He'd set four broken arms and fixed dozens of sprained ankles before people got used to hopping on and off the moving wagons. He'd also salved a couple of dozen scalds and burns, he'd sat up with a child with croup for three nights, and he'd even delivered two babies, with the help of Aunt May, the midwife.

We pick up the pieces, Donna. Some of them are broken.

Even a life of pain is not worth wasting.

If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.

Because of the way God has made us, it is impossible finally and completely to deaden the soul. The soul will resurrect, in spite of the cruelty used to destroy it. It will pop up and then be slain again, return and be shoved down through contempt. The power to destroy the soul is not in the hands of Satan, another human being, or even oneself. Nevertheless, when we manage to deaden our soul, even temporarily, we open the door to terrible consequences.

But this home over here: it needed paint but had flowers neatly planted all the way around it. That one over there had a tire swing out front, tied to a fat magnolia tree. Behind another, a lush vegetable garden. You got to fight not to give into despair, he told himself. You got to see the good that's mixed in with the bad.

In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day.

How many bodies were floating around, and how many more would die? Not the uptown swells with cars, second homes, and wallets full of credit cards, but those who had no car, no friend with a car, those who'd never left New Orleans and weren't about to flee just because the mayor said to go.

You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.

Pain is a part of growing up. It's how we learn.

God, grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.

All it took was a couple weeks and boom--they sucked the crazy out of you and your soul went with it.

Maybe I was a bad kid. But I was also slowly turning to stone.

I think my strength comes from being an insane drunk. Near death. Wanting death like a lover every day for years. My talent comes from madness - having survived madness.

The passion has never left me. I live as two people - myself, Dan Fante, and Bruno Dante or Mickey Di Salvo, or whoever I say I am in one of my books. I can tap that Bruno character any time I need to. He lives inside me like a quiet, simmering pool of magma. Years ago I stopped feeding him with booze and he was kind enough to stop trying to kill me. That's our truce.

What I want to say here is that there is a place beyond control and beyond concern that people can go, where the values and the needs of everyday life change completely. Where what matters is moment-to-moment survival to avoid mind pain.

One day at a time. Fake it 'til you make it.

Once you've wrestled, everything else in life is easy.

Right out of high school I never had the fear of getting beat, which is how most people lose.

After more than two decades here, I know that kindness is not a value that's encouraged. It's often seen as a weakness. Instead, the culture encourages keeping your head down, minding your own business, and never letting yourself be vulnerable.

Through divorce, death, and bankruptcy, lost jobs and lost boyfriends, the women of the Denver Roller Dolls are there at the rink four times a week beating each other up—and building each other up.

It's not caring if others think what I'm doing is stupid or foolish. It is about being honest with myself and doing what makes me happy and not bowing to outside pressures.

having a flattened

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?" asked Coke, who in the last two weeks had been forced to jump off a cliff, dipped into boiling oil, drowned in ice cream, and gassed in a rest-stop bathroom. "Well, okay…" "Yay!