Quotes About Resilience

To think I need a gun to protect against those who'd kill me for being Muslim ... It's too bad they don't know about my true religion of noodling - a reason to get their nuts in a snit.

He lifted his head and let it thud several times to the floor. Maybe that would send Reason whimpering back into its cave.

Anchors. You had to be your own anchor. By now there was no escaping this knowledge. Still she had been trained to look for them and despite all that had happened, she had not got over the habit.

The immigrant who comes as a wife has a more difficult time. If work exists for her, it is in the future and after much finding of feet. At present all she is, is a wife, and a wife is alone for many, many hours. There will come a day when even books are powerless to distract. When the house and its conveniences can no longer completely charm or compensate. Then she realizes she is an immigrant for life.

Perhaps that was the ultimate immigrant experience. Not that any one thing was steady enough to attach yourself to for the rest of your life, but that you found different ways to belong, ways not necessarily lasting, but ones that made your journey less lonely for a while. When something failed it was a signal to move on. For an immigrant there was no going back.

Robert E Lee didn't make it the first time and Jefferson Davis took the vacancy. Pershing didn't make it for two years, MacArthur couldn't get in the first year and Eisenhower took an extra year of high school to get in. Patton took three years to get in and five to get out.

No one forgets his pain, that's a lie. It's buried there in memory and remains in you forever.

No struggle for what you believe in is ever futile.

I am ready to make plenty of sacrifices to reach my goals, and no one's going to stop me.

India was free... broken in parts... bruised, but free. There was an essential unity to India that no partition could destroy.

Even pragmatic people needed a totem of goodness to buoy them against life's tyrannies.

Niki recalled Nooran working on the embroidery as she scribbled or scrawled, both seated atop her bed. Faced with the prospect of IIMC, what would Nooran do? When the world darkened, Nooran turned to the bagh. When it dazzled, she embroidered some more. Whatever it threw at her, she seized it and wrote her own narrative.

I could travel back in time, way back, when at a home with too many mouths to feed, love was a constant accompaniment to each spare meal. …. With my food, I could recall the person I used to be. Before everything changed.

I jump over dead bodies, and in my mind flashes a thought: how quickly men become accustomed to things which, at one time, they would have found impossible to imagine.

I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; even today, inside me, here, and here, I am still a free woman.

Le désespoir, c'est comme la prison, la mine ou l'usine. Ça vous lâche jamais.

Non è la strada che è difficile, è la difficoltà che è la strada".

Si crees que debe hacerse, lo haces; si no marcha como debiera, bueno, que te sirva de experiencia, pero nunca pienses que se trata de un fracaso.

Ha sido más recio que la miseria y que la burla.

Yo no puedo vivir el momento, porque vivo en función de una lucha política, o bueno, actividad política digamos, ¿entendés? Todo lo que yo puedo aguantar acá, que es bastante, … pero que es nada si pensás en la tortura, … que vos no sabés lo que es.

Es que habría que saber aceptar las cosas como se dan, y apreciar lo bueno que te pase, aunque no dure. Porque nada es para siempre.

Qué es ser hombre, para vos? --Es muchas cosas, pero para mí... bueno, lo más lindo del hombre es eso, ser lindo, fuerte, pero sin hacer alharaca de fuerza, y que va avanzando seguro. Que camine seguro, como mi mozo, que hable sin miedo, que sepa lo que quiere, adonde va, sin miedo de nada.

A human's best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.

A xente boa veu ao mundo para foderse, a mala anda por aí pisando forte. (p. 166)