Quotes About Resilience

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it.

As Rilke put it, "When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must carry the cross with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that life is suffering, but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering. In that the Buddha was a spiritual genius, and we Christians could learn a lot from him and his mature followers.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.

Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.

She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

Many inspired plans are hatched in darkness. And once dignity is surrendered there are plenty of options.

Because—and don't let anybody tell you different—novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.

Enduring what couldn't be cured, she supposed, was what people meant by being adult, though it was ironic that so few of them—including her parents—had mastered the skill themselves.

Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In

Anne herself was no stranger to adversity, but she had always hated any situation that could only be endured. She was able to summon the necessary courage for a bold, confident stroke, but simply getting by left her dispirited, and it seemed that the older she got, the more frequent these situations became.

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

I'm not hurting. That's the strange part. I don't mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I'll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I'd even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I'd missed a sign, and that if I hadn't, things would've been different.

It's just that living with him—being married to him— is like being covered with these little cuts all the time. There's no big gash you can show anybody, nothing they'd believe would really hurt. But these damn little nicks, they suck the blood right out of you.

But for some reason, these periods of melancholy were important to him, and he rode them out the way some people did migraines.

The past was in them, still disturbing but no longer a governing history; the trauma strengthened the convictions they possessed about how to lead their lives.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he's still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he's still left with his hands.

Don't thank me," she said. "I didn't do it out of any love for you. If I'd refused, you'd have killed me. This way, I've got a few hours' head start.

The contest is a lion fight. So chin up, put your shoulders back, walk proud, strut a little. Don't lick your wounds. Celebrate them. The scars you bear are the sign of a competitor. You're in a lion's fight. Just because you didn't win doesn't mean you don't know how to roar.

The message is clear – those who do not feel in control of their lives are less successful, and less psychologically and physically healthy, than those who do feel in control.