Quotes About Resilience

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life.

but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.

When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you´ve gone down fighting the good fight.

And then one day the walls of your house finally collapse. If the door is still standing, however, all you have to do is walk through it,and you are back inside. It's pleasant sleeping out under the stars. Never mind the rain. It can't last very long.

Life got in the way -- two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don't have the balls to stand up for ourselves -- but I had never lost my interest in books.

But it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived.

I've made my nothing, and now I've got to live in it.

Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashed against the stones.

So weak, so little left, time running out. I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can't help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth.

love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.

and if he could survive the experience without completely losing heart, then perhaps there was some hope for him after all. By sticking with the cab, he wasn't trying to make the best of a bad situation. He was looking for a way to make things happen, and until he understood what those things were, he wouldn't have the right to release himself from his bondage.

Lo que realmente me asombra no es que todo esté derrumbado, sino la gran cantidad de cosas que todavía siguen en pie.

The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you're made of steel.

Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes. Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall.

because he was a man who had suffered but because he was a man who had suffered and could still crack jokes.

what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune

She seemed perfect to you, and even during her first attack of vertigo, which you happened to witness when you were six (the two of you climbing up the inner staircase of the Statue of Liberty), you were not alarmed, because she was a good and conscientious mother, and she managed to hide her fear from you by turning the descent into a game: sitting on the stairs together and going down one step at a time, asses on the rungs, laughing all the way to the bottom.

Sólo de la constancia nacen las grandes cosas

No importa lo que digan los demás; lo único importante es mantenerse en pie.

Is that what we mean by life? Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.

La única constante en este mundo es la mierda, muchacho.

When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream.

The boundaries of my world had shrunk, but I was still alive, and as long as I could go on breathing and farting and thinking my thoughts, what difference did it make where I was?