Quotes About Resilience

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We've come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don't always take into account.

Bellow "Tell the range and all that's howling, the flickers of life beyond the weeds, the vulture's furrowed brow of flight, the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle; tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain, and all that makes you go quiet again, tell them that you didn't come here to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars between-tell them you didn't come to disturb the night air and throw a fit, then get down in the dark and do it.

But love is impossible and it goes on despite the impossible.

Months later, when we went on our first date, I tried to seem put together, I wore a shawl she had given me. And her ring. I thought everything was behind me: death, and dying, and sickness. I didn't know I was changing my life— that I would have done anything, that what was left of me would become so ruthless to survive.

I am in no hurry to stop believing we are supposed to sway like this, that we too are immense and calling out.

I slip into bed and lie there beside Your body like a buoy that the ocean resents. If I could just grab hold and find a way to paddle, If you could stop dragging your feet along the gravel. As a child I remember knowing how to float When sober was the wind and my body, the boat. Now each step is anchored and you continue to drift In the room where we pretend that we are alive, Where you and I commit the sin, and you and I forgive.

See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival break down, make the factory fail, to know that this war was winless, to know that she would singlehandedly destroy us all.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don't.

Humans are so strange in the ways that we are either recovering too quickly from something or holding on to pain forever. There seems to be no middle ground. We bounce back or we wallow. But remembering the hardest moments of grief or loss and letting them be present for you in the good moments is something I've found useful and grounding as I age. It feels like a way of remembering that balance does exist. This too. This grief. This joy. Together always intertwined.

I think a lot about the word tenacity. What it takes to survive in a world that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes hostile. I'm always amazed at the body's willingness to continue, to keep going. The heart that keeps pumping, the lungs that keep breathing, the way the will to live can outsmart those other dark voices inside.

I haven't given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even

crossed-legged with my friend named Echo who taught me how to amplify the strange sound the frogs made by cupping my ears. I need to hold this close within me, when today's news is full of dead children, their faces opening their mouths for air that will not come. Once I was a child too and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour, eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping and uncapping our ears to hear the song the tenderest animals made.

Darling Cockroaches of the Highest Order, hard underthings of hard underworlds, I am utterly suspicious of advice.

What I know now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each morning and recognise my own flesh, for this one thing she made—me—to remain how she intended, for one of us to make it out unscathed

Almost two years had passed once again since his father's death. Hugo remained in the city, pure and strong as a virgin; for the man who harbours a god in his breast will remain untouched by the baseness which the world holds in store.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started";

Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.

The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.

Any time you end a relationship, and everyone has ended plenty in their life, it's always a tough thing and hard to get over.

It's funny when you're a kid how you can acclimate to almost anything.

The pain you are feeling is merely the strike of every hammer blow on the anvil as you are being forged.

After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P's can stunt recovery: (1) personalization - the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness - the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence - the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.

There's a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around