Quotes About Resilience

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.

To survive, much less succeed, I learned I could not give myself over to either pleasure or misery in excess. Whatever you felt was not important. To

I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.

The sacrifice is usually chained to the rock. She does not usually dance out to meet her monster.

Their whole difficult lives seemed not to weigh on them at all. Taken as mornings and meals, suppers and evenings, all of the world could be carried, both the sad and the delicious, their lives seemed to say.

Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis, or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.

I think you can never know what you can live without. I think you can never know what you will live through. Only when the disaster arrives and you are there does the depth of your real inner resources reveal itself, and not a moment before

I am built for this terrible pain, I told myself, and sent myself on my way.

She said this watching my eyes as if she were testing the edge of a blade on me. And so I made sure not to flinch.

The life I led now I'd made so I would never be her again. I'd never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I

I became something they couldn't imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become. They

They had the faces of angels and the determination of demons.

It's nothin' to me, he said. We're none of us made right for this world. But we're still here, aren't we? And

The rains!' everyone sang. The wind struck us with a force that made our line bend and waver.

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.

Real firmness is good for anything; strut is good for nothing.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy.

Compassionate love may be strong. It sobs, it burns, then it wipes away its tears – and it does nothing.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all palisades, all fences, within which she is held captive!

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

One place like another. That was true enough, he thought. Even the merchant seamen were the same. Every ship was the last. One more voyage, just enough pay and bounty saved, and it would be used to buy a little alehouse, a chandlery, a smallholding from some country squire. But it never seemed to happen, unless the man was thrown on the beach in peacetime, or rejected as a useless cripple. The sea always won in the end. The

They were about to continue a journey that had really started long ago. A journey that had been strangely interrupted, that even now someone was trying to prevent.