Quotes About Resilience

I'm not looking to wear the white man out with my ability to suffer.

Once you live in the street, there's nothing but the street.

We're not gonna die We're not gonna die We're not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.

it can't afford to be hard. it won't allow itself psychologically.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.

When the going gets tough the tough get going

The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. Unvarying things, she saw, must have a deeper value than we know.

I'd been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me. The

In other words if I give up now I'll almost surely give up in the more important contests of the future." "That's it exactly, Gary." "I'm giving up," I said.

What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor.

Living defensively is the central theme of our age. How else can we live? Biologically we've instructed ourselves in the deepest way possible that living in a defensive manner is the only way we'll survive, both in theme and fact.

She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she'd come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day's complaints.

words stick even as lives fly apart.

Frustration is oftentimes a wonderful alternative to complacency.

God is guts" — a pre-Hemingway and pre-Hammett apothegm of toughness — is from the hobo ballad "The Little Red God

At what point is it acceptable to give up?

There's a dance in the old dame yet.

it s cheerio my deario that pulls a lady through exclamation point

every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint' -archy the cockroach

every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint

If you tell someone you love him, and that person says 'Well, I don't love you, is that a reason for you to suffer? Just because someone rejects you doesn't mean you have to reject yourself. If one person doesn't love you, someone else will love you. There is always someone else. And it's better to be with someone who wants to be with you than to be with someone who has to be with you.

Someone can intentionally send emotional poison, and if you don't take it personally, you will not eat it. When you don't take the emotional poison, it becomes even worse to the sender, but not in you.