Quotes About Resilience

I will tell them nothing." The answer came with no hesitation, clear and crisp. "It is not for them to say what I will do.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

If they break through the wall, they will burn the ships—our only way of getting home, the only thing that makes us an army instead of refugees.

I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I'm afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unravelling them again at night, making nothing.

A moment passed, and then I felt her hand on my back. You will be all right, she said. I have done it, and look, I live.

you can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ~ Odysseus

I let the pebbles tumble to the ground from my fingers, where they lie, haphazard or purposeful, an augury or an accident. If Chiron were here, he could read them, tell us our fortunes. But he is not here. "What if he will not beg?" I ask. "Then he will die. They will all die. I will not fight until he does." His chin juts, bracing for reproach. I am worn out. My arm hurts where I cut it, and my skin feels coated with unwholesome sweat. I do not answer.

Même le meilleur des fers devient cassant à force d'avoir été trop battu.

He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what means to be alive.

That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.

Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They're disaster-prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their head. And you can't reverse the process.

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.

These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids.

A bird, a horse, a dog, a man, a girl, or a cat—you knock them about and diminish yourself because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable.

All women are at war all the time, and when I've got hunger pains, it shows a little more.

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly.

I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?

He was back at me like a cat, and he swung a hard chunk of wood from one of the smashed chairs. I caught the first one on the shoulder and I cleverly caught the next one right over the left ear. It broke a big white bell in my head, and he side-stepped, grunting for breath, and let me go down. I landed on my side, and he punted me in the belly like Groza trying for one from the mid-field stripe.

She trudged along, dutiful as a naughty child.

There had been a slight flavor of childishness in her outbursts, a little of petulance, but it was mostly a mature woman in that special area of pain reserved, in irony, for those who know how to give.

Soon we will all eat stones.