Quotes About Resilience

and yet just now, in my cold cot, I felt strangely close to him. It was his life I was reaching for in coming here, and if I couldn't have my father back, exactly, maybe not ever, I could have the rightness of looking in the same direction, of stepping into his shadow with my own. I didn't know a thing about marriage or men—that had been proven well enough. But I did know horses. For the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I should be.

we never survive them, or anyone we love. Not in the

turned down all the lamps and padded to my room in the dark. Soundlessly, I packed my few things quickly and was on my way before midnight.

But he'd "got a leg," as they say in horse speak. Before he'd come to Soysambu, he'd been overtrained, and his tendons had become sensitive, with a tendency to swell.

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. Sometimes I've thought it's only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too—a

I'm throwing myself a birthday party next week," he said. "One of the many ways I'm whistling past the graveyard these days. I'll bet you're a grand whistler, aren't you? Please come." —

We had both tried for the sun, and had fallen, lurching to earth again, tasting melted wax and sorrow. Denys wasn't hers, or mine.

My mother in that awful parking lot, dead on Christmas Day. Jenny's murder and Eden's cancer. Hap's disappearance. My daughter's accident. The dark abyss of my work and how it connects in an awful and yawning way to everything else.

Life is full of messes. Your mistakes aren't bigger than anyone else's.

I would show her I wasn't a bit of cobweb in the corner, something to be wiped or straightened, but a rival worth her notice. I would learn her ways and habits, and track her closely until I knew what she was and how to best her, and what precisely it would take to steal my good life back.

A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.

Long ago Corolla told me that it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what

There's death in life, Anna, things too impossible to bear. So many things, and yet we bear them.

what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it. I'm starting to understand the difference, and how maybe the only way we can survive what's here, and what we are, is together.

Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.

was only to anchor him until morning. There

In a small place like Mendocino, I know all too well, any act of violence is personal. Everyone will be feeling this. Everyone will be affected.

No matter how resilient children can be, or how wanted, loved, and nurtured they are by their new parents, the original wounds of abandonment and rejection aren't just magically healed. Grit and inner strength don't altogether heal those wounds, either, because the parenting piece is primal. Mothers and fathers are supposed to stay. That's the original human story, in every culture, since the beginning of time.

but I believe even the toughest kinds of

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've prepared for everything as well as I can, but is anyone truly ready for death? Was Maia when she saw the ground flying up to meet her?

After talking with many of them and seeing how they lived, I realized they didn't have an endless supply of bravery, because no one ever did. When courage failed them, they would find a way to stand their ground anyway and fight on spirit alone. They had grit rather than bravery.

More than anyone I'd known, 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.