Quotes About Resilience

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

Optimism More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. from "For What Binds Us

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

Here is a soul, accepting nothing.

Only remembering that a self in exile is still a self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

However many holes are in you, always there's room for another. However much you carry, you can hold more. "My Corkboard

What is usual is not what is always. As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back. Footsteps resume their clipped edges, birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear. Where were they? By what route did they return? A woman mute for years forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

The self in exile remains the self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Fear has trapped me, rendered me immobile and powerless. I'd forgotten I even had wings, let alone how to use them.

None of us were perfect, and life made us infinitely less so. Tears

Kintsukuroi is the name for this ancient Japanese art, which teaches that broken objects are not something to hide away but should be displayed with pride, for they are stronger and more beautiful for surviving the breakage. I think I, too, am stronger and more beautiful for surviving

Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.

And I knew then that I would have to live, and go on living: what sorrow it was; and still what sorrow ignites but does not consume my heart.

We try a new drug, a new combination of drugs, and suddenly I fall into my life again like a vole picked up by a storm then dropped three valleys and two mountains away from home. I can find my way back. I know I will recognize the store where I used to buy milk and gas. I remember the house and barn, the rake, the blue cups and plates, the Russian novels I loved so much, and the black silk nightgown that he once thrust into the toe of my Christmas stocking.

Not sure how ye can look so settled after such an unsettling day" Joseph said. "I know you're resilient but even strong and solid trees should look a little windblown following a storm!" "I learned to cope by leanin into the wind" I said, "just like you told me.

She says she's too old to fight and too fat to run, so she just has to rely on her good nature to survive.

When your father died, I thought I'd die too. But then your heart keeps beating, you keep taking breaths and getting hungry and needing sleep, so you know you're not dead. One day, something makes you laugh and you're ripped with guilt because you can. A month passes and then a year, and you've gone on with your life even knowing you couldn't, but you do.

That everything that happens can be converted to good. We simply do not know the good of it, our world being so vast and wide and us but a small part in it

A tragedy tears away a hope; a kindness brings it back.

draw on to change the circumstances she found herself in. She'd build a ladder with courage as a rung. Maybe kindness would lift her higher too. It was the image she fell asleep pondering.