Quotes About Resilience

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.

If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle's eye to enter heaven. . . . This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is an apartment, a man is in the box. . . . Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. 'Another bullshit night in suck city, my father mutters.

Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...

I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.

Wolves were burned alive, dragged to death behind horses, fed fishhooks inside meat, set free with mouths and penises wired shut.

Pain helps us grow stronger.

If things don't go your way, you can change the way you feel about it.

The rigours of experience were beating relentlessly against his muse and Brian Wilson could no longer snugly dream on like before.

in rock'n'roll it wasn't the winners but the losers who made for the most compelling stories.

Looking back on my childhood now, there's a sort of glow to my reminiscences. It's like my memory has blocked out most of the bad stuff. I just remember all those glorious sunny days and good times. You need to have good memories from your past. You never know when you're going to have to depend on those memories just to see you through a bad patch in your adult life.

Better to accept what you cannot change and learn to adapt than rail against the immutable and end up wasting time and effort.

With creation and function came peace. With mental fortitude came strength and the banishment of weakness.

All those years we'd spent learning these chops, and all those gigs in Germany where you'd play all night, and along comes punk. It has nothing to do with that. A lot of people went out of business.

As our good friend Ron Geesin was fond of announcing, 'The next dance will be a fight.

We also gained an insight into how the rest of the music business viewed us when Alan Price raised a laugh at our expense by banging the reverb on his Hammond organ and announcing that this was psychedelic music. At the time we were mortified, probably because all our mums were in the audience; any sense of resentment has nearly worn off.

If you're an original thinker, you are going get told 'no' a lot, and you have to be able to hear 'no' many times from the bankers and trust that at some point, someone is going to recognize that you are an artist and not a can of soda.

A resilient people cherishing liberty and equality and the rule of law will endure.

America, 5 years after this brutal attack, is testament that a Nation conceived in liberty and equality will endure. It is a triumph of millions of Americans but it is also the triumph of an idea larger than any one person, larger than any one nation.

Great leaders are not always popular.

As a leader, you cannot force the opposition to feel they can't succeed— they will do that on their own. But you can lead your team to such dominance that giving in becomes the opposition's only solution. Keep on your team to push hard and, eventually, the other team will submit.