Quotes About Resilience

It's not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it.

Sometimes the only antidote for pain is more of it.

I wish I could break into pieces," I told him one night, just a week after I'd come back. "That would feel better somehow. Isn't the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you're alive, but really you're blown apart?

For seven years Ernest had been not so much in my heart and mind as in my very blood cells. And now I would have to learn to live without him. How? Where could one learn to do that kind of amputation, and walk away alive, and still be the same person?

My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

You're making something new. Don't forget that when it starts to hurt.

I didn't quite know what to say. Kitty was one of the most poised and self-confident women I'd ever known, and here she was knocked off her feet and set spinning.

If the raging waters had reached out to swallow me, I would have let them. I wanted to die that day—I did—and there'd been other times, too. Not many, but they were there, and as I watched Ernest twitch in an uneasy sleep, I couldn't help wondering if we all had them. And if so, if we survived them, was it by chance alone? Hours

He was never yours, a voice in my head said. But what did that matter? I had lost him just the same.

Where was that fierce girl now? I didn't feel any whisper of her stirring in me. I also had no way of knowing how much I was yet supposed to weather—when my father might return, or even if he would. The

Only trouble sticks to me with any regularity…but I'm learning to think that can shape a person, too.

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

In all my years of living in the bush, I had never caught malaria or any other of the terrible fevers or plagues. Now I was felled by something just as serious though more difficult to name—an illness of the spirit.

In the center if the road, I saw a heavy black sewing machine on its side, as if it had crawled out onto the street to die.

In the center of the road, I saw a heavy black sewing machine on its side, as if it had crawled out onto the street to die.

had forged her myself, out of brokenness, learning to love wildness instead of fearing it. To thrive on the exhilaration of the hunt, charging headlong into the world even—or especially—when it hurt to do it.

Swahili phrase he'd challenged me with years before, "A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.

He shook his head. "I see you trying to be tough skinned, but that makes sense. As a woman you'll have to work twice as hard for everything. I'm not sure I could do it." He lit a cigarette and drew on it, the end flaring red in the dark. When he released the held smoke, he looked at me. "I think you're rather brave, actually." Was

toughness isn't the same as strength

That's the saddest piece as I see it, and have over and over. 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. (seven) All the way to the village, I feel like a shaken-up snow globe, sharp flecks of memory colliding head on.

it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.

Those things are as real as anything else, though, and I'll have to fly through them. Straight through the sickening dips and air pockets, because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't.