Quotes About Resilience

Even on especially hard days, I began to notice him everywhere, setting a table before me in the presence of my enemies, pursuing me with his love. Both the child and the cynic walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The cynic focuses on the darkness; the child focuses on the Shepherd.

I knew we must stay in absolute sync, for the enemy had grown so subtle, its camouflage so chameleon, we had to be on constant watch.

We were doing the best we could with what we had left, and more and more it was like Diogenes tossing away the tin cup because he could drink with his hands. It turns out there is no end to learning what you can do without.

walking with on Robertson was an outing of the self-destructed, trying to make do with one day at a time.

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body's weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our resumes to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

All I would have to do was not exist below the waist, and the future was mine.

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.

Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

You need only to have glimpsed it once to know there's a window out of all this black and sleepless night. Then you must use it to hope on. Key to the dream country where all your people are whole again, and the gunboats can't reach you, and the Empire of Hate is rubble. You and your secret dream of freedom are the tidal wave. Keep watch, every night if you have to. As for sleeping, you can sleep when you're dead.

Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.

When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last—and wouldn't end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.

When you know who you are, it's harder for people to fuck with you.

When you know who you are, it's harder for people to fuck with you. Hollywood is dangerous because the great hobby they have in that town is fucking with other people. Building you up, knocking you down, until finally you are destroyed. They all want to create you and mold you.

If softball leagues treated players as delicately as teachers do students, there'd be a rule about not striking out. After three strikes, they'd bring out a tee, or maybe the coach would go up there, take the bat out of the kid's hands, and hit it for him. We'd tell ourselves we were protecting their fragile psyches, when in reality we'd be sending a clear message: You can't do it, so I'll do it for you.

It's real hard to come off as even slightly superior when you're living a Tom and Jerry episode.

If you don't have enemies, you don't have character.

You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

There are two Newman's laws. The first one is "It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." The second is "Just when things look darkest, they go black.

It's always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.

I forget that my greatest defense lies in my defenselessness. Being basically powerless, I have no defense. Having no defense, I choose to rise above the immediate situation rather than lower myself to that person's standard of behavior.

By feeling secure in my defenselessness, I am able to be my own person. I behave like a successful member of A.A., like a person who practices the Twelve Steps in all his affairs and has ceased fighting everything and everybody. I literally win by not taking the bait, by not fighting.

Are we doormats? Definitely not. The difference, as I see it, is that we get on with our lives. We don't sit around letting that situation decide our emotional state.