Quotes About Resilience

Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

When you're 15, pain skips over reason, aims right for the marrow.

what is bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.

Life...moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops—but the changing doesn't.

For a long time, my mother's wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves - or worse, in the care of New York City Children's Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

Bro, how you doing? You holding on? Man, you know how it goes. One day chicken. Next day bone. Two old men talking

The empty swing set reminds us of this— that what is bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.

Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. —Langston Hughes

When boys called our names, we said 'Don't even say my name. Don't even put it in your mouth.' When they said, 'You ugly anyway,' we knew they were lying. When they hollered, 'Conceited!' we said, 'No- convinced!' We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together wasn't something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.

I know in my heart , Tiago whispered, the language we like to speak is music and poetry and even cold, sweet piraguas on hot, hot summer days. But it feels like this place wants to break my heart. It feels like every day it tries to make my mom feel tinier and tinier, like the size of Perrito's head in my hands.

Guess that's where the tears came from, knowing that there's so much in this great big world that you don't have a single ounce of control over.

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.

But damn, am I hella tired, Iris. Hella tired.

Old people used to always say, You only as old as you feel. Here I am closer to fifty than forty, but I feel older than that most days. Feel like the world is trying to pull me down back into it.

Even when my girls were little, we'd go down there, my grandmother tells us. And people'd be marching. The marching didn't just start yesterday. Police with those dogs, scared everybody near to death. Just once I let my girls march.

I held on to my mama's Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy's stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.

we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn. August

As they grabbed each other's arms and bounce-walked down the hall, I was sure no ghost mothers existed in their pasts. I truly believed they were standing steadily in the world.

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Each day, her sore and swollen body pressed against a hard wind blowing her own eyes closed. At night she went in and out of fitful sleeps, woke in the dark, sweaty and struggling for air. Where had the air gone?

Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

Let's say it's rain--the people who got problems with us being together--let's call them and their problems rain." Ellie nodded. "Okay, they're rain." She smiled. "So now what?" "So it's not always raining, is it? But when it's not raining, we know the rain isn't gone forever.

I wanted to climb into her world and live in it with her. She was beautiful and kind and funny and identified as "certified crazy." I learned that certified crazy meant nothing to lose, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be self-conscious about.

So after the tears were all cried out, it was time to move on and figure out what to do with all that was coming at me.