Quotes About Resilience

Samuel's funeral and the talk with Kate should have made Adam sad and bitter, but they did not.

It's not so bad when you get used to it," said Doc. "I've been drinking it for seventeen years.

For I truly believe that people call their lives to them the way you'd whistle up a dog. I seem to thrive in small frustrations and make them up when I don't have them. This is not abnormal. In fact it is very supernormal.

E nei loro occhi cresce il furore. Nell'anima degli affamati i semi del furore sono diventati acini, e gli acini ormai grappoli maturi per la vendemmia.

Because they were not hurt or insulted, they were not defensive or combative. Because their dignity was intact, they had no need to be overbearing, and because the Cooper boys had never heard that they were inferior, their minds could grow to their true limits.

tell ya, a one-eye' fella got a hard row

John Steinbeck

Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkest. 'Thou mayest, thou mayest!' What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Tell 'em ya dong's growed sence you los' your eye.

If the other tire blew, there we were, on a wet and lonesome road, having no recourse except to burst into tears and wait for death. And perhaps some kind birds might cover us with leaves.

You cannot cut the ground from under a man and expect him to act normally.

In Aikido, we train not to learn how to win; we train to learn to emerge victorious in any situation.

We were in a cell together in a Colonial prison, along with hundreds of other people from 2010. It wasn't very comfortable. No beds. No chairs. You just had to sit on the floor in your own filth. And my filth, I noticed, was stupendous.

The beginning of being fine is noticing how things really are: 1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely. 2. If you are alive, that's good; lower the bar. 3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts. 4. If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate. 5. What you need might be given to you. 6. The true life is in between winning and losing. 7. If you have nothing - give it away.

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong.

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

But it was my way of becoming a human being, and part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.