Quotes About Resilience

Living in West Texas is sort of like living in Hell, but without the favorable climate and charming people.

Life meant reducing expectations and making-do with what one had.

It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.

Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved

My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.

But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.

I didn't want to be a sweet boy's sweet girlfriend. I wanted to be Fawn's equal, the kind of girl who stood up for herself and took care of business, who cut guys loose when it was required.

When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for "beginnings." But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along.

The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.

He talks about the gift of being lost in the woods. I've always found that comforting, somehow. That maybe you have to be truly lost before you can find yourself again.

It's not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it. You need to heal yourself. Your child self too, Anna. Make room for her. Find a way to let her in.

I've sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

How some victims don't have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don't believe the life they have is theirs to save.

That's what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against yourself.

The world needs an army of Wandas—strong, sarcastic, unafraid women who say what they think and act straightforwardly, without apology or permission. Women who roar instead of flinch.

Maybe that's the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.

I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said. "It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. —Frederick Buechner

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I'm at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it's impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you're doing it right.

If you guys can't make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

They'd scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.