Quotes About Resilience

I have no intention of being a footnote in someone else's life." [on being a war correspondent during WWII]

The latrine broke my lion heart.

It is an almost overpowering effort to be just, informed, sane and strong when you are worried about a roof over your head, money for food, for the children's shoes, for coal, for a little fun, worried and harassed by the daily unending problem of living. But it is an effort that must be made, for lasting peace is not going to come of itself, nor cheaply, nor due to someone else.

There is a fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths.

If you take employee engagement seriously, you take on a no halfway, no turning-back high adventure of finding out just how far your personal and organizational courage will take you.

If nothing's working for you, if you feel as though you're pushing forward against the grain, the most productive and proactive thing you can do is nothing. Nature is turning you inward, to gain power through peace, rather than outward to gain power through activity.

I'm a firm believer that ultimately the truth cannot hurt you. It can bring you pain, heartache, and sadness but it cannot destroy the person you are. It can bring you understanding of whom and what you are.

Mortal love is but the licking of honey from thorns…" There was laughter again then, and applause, and a cry, "Well sung!

Pain is a very precious gift. Do not waste it.

Don't give up. Defend your ideas, but be flexible. Success seldom comes in exactly the form you imagine.

it is my trauma patients who seem the oldest souls in the world, though some of them are quite young people. They are proud human spirits who seem ancient and ageless at the same time. Over the years, I have seen brighter passions in their eyes than in the eyes of any priest or guru. I have heard more wisdom from their mouths than I have read in any book.

I believe that most of us cannot know what we would do, trapped in a situation that required such a seemingly no-win decision. But I do know that anyone wanting to recover from psychological trauma must face just this kind of dilemma, made yet more harrowing because her circumstance is not anything so rescuable as being locked in a house, but rather involves a solitary, unlockable confinement inside the limits of her own mind.

these severely traumatized patients, people who have been through living nightmares, people who might blamelessly choose death, often emerge from successful treatment by constructing lives for themselves that are freer than most ordinary lives from what Sigmund Freud, a century ago, labeled as "everyday misery." They become true keepers of the faith and are the most passionately alive people I know. Or

after twenty-five years of treating trauma survivors, I have learned that getting hit is actually one of the more bearable ways a person can be assaulted.

When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense;you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

We are all a little crazy.

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty. —ELIE WIESEL

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn't want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

I wasn't sure exactly what "okay" would involve, but I was willing to settle for "unmurdered.

recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

By tricky I meant I was getting an average of an 85 percent chance of failure and death, and it was only that low because my last diagnostic said my risk assessment module was wonky. (I know, that explains a lot about me.)

This is how we fight: throw ourselves at each other and see whose parts give out first.

I felt this would be the point where a human would sigh, so I sighed.

Please calm yourselves and stop talking. Plan A01: Rain Destruction has been superseded by Plan B01: Distract and Extract.