Quotes About Resilience

Sophie got herself to the mirror, and found that she had to hobble. The face in the mirror was quite calm, because it was what she expected to see. It was the face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surrounded by wispy white hair. Her own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at her, looking rather tragic. Don't worry, old thing, Sophie said to the face. You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.

It's silly to let the bad things come out on top! The good, happy things are just as important. They just don't seem to last. You want to catch them at their best and keep them if you can.

Se a princípio não tiver sucesso, tente, tente, tente novamente.

if anyone wanted to turn her out now, they were going to have to use extreme and violent magic to do it.

You should prize this pain of yours. This is what will make you human all the way through. Nothing less will do that.

A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.

How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?

Must be I find you tough and lusty as the life, all toil and tempo, finesse and plain fight, with values so old they startle me. Must be I think of you as I do the rugged flowers that prove themselves over and over in the spring, that elsewhere might perish, but here master the earth, bloom into gangly lives of high color, and inhale the sun, knowing the land better than the land does. Hardy, savvy, they will outlive us all.

I'd suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had known her as a girl and I was starting to understand how spooked she'd felt. I wasn't sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms. [p. 95]

Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can't go back to how it was, we're designing a good life for us, in spite of everything.

Nature rarely wastes a winning strategy.

What remained would gradually acquire its own shape and dimension, but many of our favorite things, my favorite ways of being a couple, had vanished and it was no use pretending, hoping, wishing that he would return to his old self, and me to mine. [p. 156]

Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.

In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.

Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!

Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

Strolling through Bia?owieza's mass of life, one would never guess the role it played in Lutz Heck's ambitions, the Warsaw Zoo's fate, and the altruistic opportunism of Jan and Antonina, who capitalized on the Nazis' obsession with prehistoric animals and a forest primeval to rescue scores of endangered neighbors and friends.

Seres tan encariñados con su libertad como los seres humanos saben cómo volver a plantear casi cualquier tema. Si hay una cosa en la que realmente nos mostramos magistrales, es en empujar los límites, inventar estrategias, encontrar caminos para rodear las verdades más impías, tomar a la vida por las solapas y sacudirla sin piedad. Es cierto que la vida tiende a devolver los golpes, pero eso nunca ha bastado para deternos.

She had a very traditional Catholic upbringing and that didn't deter her. On the contrary it strengthened her determination to be true to herself, to follow her heart, even though it meant enduring a lot of self-sacrifice. Intrigued

Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life. Chapter

Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. x.   adhesions

Cursed by its strategic location in eastern Europe, Poland had been invaded, sacked, and carved up many times, its borders ebbing and flowing; some village children learned five languages just to speak with neighbors. War wasn't something Antonina wanted to think about, especially since her last experience of war stole both of her parents, so she assured herself, as most Poles did, of their solid alliance with France, keeper of a powerful army, and Britain's sworn protection.

Kiddush ha-Shem, the principle of service to God, acquired a new definition in the Ghetto, where it became the struggle to preserve life in the face of destruction. A similar word arose in German—überleben—which meant to prevail and stay alive, a

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.