Quotes About Resilience

Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes

Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind—even if your voice shakes.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you're with. Love the color green. But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.

As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn't to say you haven't changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.

You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don't always know.

187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. -- Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?

But I trust I will live in my skin again, if life is sweet and long.

We may become more used to jumping into flight, but that doesn't mean we have done with all perches.

I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

IN ONE OF his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.

One thing they don't tell you bout the blues when you got 'em, you keep on fallin' 'cause there ain't no bottom," sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging.

Skin is soft; it takes what you do to it.

Annie] Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies doea not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

Sadness keeps attempting to tie weights to her wrists and ankles, therefore she has to keep moving, she has to outpace it.

She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.

What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

We must pursue what's in front of us, not what we can't have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.

You need a plan," she hears—or seems to hear—her old nurse, Sofia, say, from a place near her elbow. "To lose your temper is to lose the battle.

To lose your temper is to lose the battle.

Did my daughter appear to me a decade and a half before she was born? I like to think so. There she was, looping back through time to brush past a person not yet ready to be her mother--nowhere near ready, if I'm honest--tipping me the wink that she would one day arrive in my life. Readying me, perhaps, for the road ahead, sowing the seeds for all the strength, compassion and resilience required for her existence.

You shall not look at me, she wants to say, you shall not see into me. I will not be yours. How dare you assess me and find me lacking?

Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into your life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk. It could, I can see, have gone the other way, and made me into a person hindered by fear, hobbled by caution. Instead, I leapt off harbour walls. I walked alone in remote mountains. I took night trains through Europe on my own, arriving in capital cities in the middle of the night with nowhere to stay.