Quotes About Resilience

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.

He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, I'm sorry. No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.

Crazy is a species under no threat at all.

Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.

A body can take two weeks of anything.

Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonized mites, bits of insect frass and bird feather. . . . Everything climbs over everything else, fighting for scraps of light. If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.

A woman of her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can't use her? we're down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she's going to roll over and die?

The blackest despair at the heart of them gets pressed to diamond.

We're sorry. We didn't know how hard it is for you to grow back.

Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted.

She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she'd be ready for anything the next morning.

Humans are so frail. How have they survived long enough to wreak all the shit they have?

pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had

Down another branch, this one, she shouts, "Here's to unsuicide," and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience.

It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

She fights to hold on to the thing she has just glimpsed. But traffic, bickering, business: the street's brutality begins to close in. She walks faster, on the brink of the old panic. Everything she has just won begins to fade again into the irresistible force of other people.

People. So much pain.

Someone who doesn't even know she's been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.

Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight.