Quotes About Resilience

What I wish I had known, aged 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.

It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.

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. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it.

Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard.

THAT THE THINGS IN LIFE WHICH DON'T GO TO PLAN ARE USUALLY MORE IMPORTANT, MORE FORMATIVE, IN THE LONG RUN, THAN THE THINSGS THAT DO

There is, she is starting to see, nothing more she can do. She can stay beside him, comfort him as best she can, but this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious. It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him.

You see, she says to him, you cannot change what you are given, cannot bend or alter what is dealt to you.

She gets hold of the wooden gatepost and grips it with both hands. Everything is shattered but holding on to this post feels like the best course of action, the only thing to do. If she can stay here, at the gate, with her daughters on one side of her and her son on the other, she can hold everything together.

There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way.

Maggie O'Farrell

It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine - perhaps to a fault - about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn't scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.

She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.

She wouldn't let go of the baby,' her grandmother says suddenly. 'Who?' Iris pounces. 'Esme?' Her grandmother's eyes are focused somewhere beyond the window. 'They had to sedate her. She wouldn't let go.

Esme looks up, sees the watch in Iris's outstretched hand and shakes her head. She holds up the blue check material and Iris sees that it is a dress, a woollen dress, that it's crumpled and two of the buttons are missing, torn out from the fabric. Esme is shaking it, as if something might be caught in its folds, then casts it aside.

Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that - in the phrase she always used inside her own head - she got away with it. No one found her out.

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.

Maggie O'Farrell

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. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.

He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns.

She doesn't like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small.

Sadness keeps attempting to tie weights to her wrists and ankles, therefore she has to keep moving, she has to outpace it. And so she walks, along one terrace then another, from one battlement to the next

There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.