Quotes About Resilience

To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero

He had been the person who took. He'd been the one who was taken. And he'd been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.

And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him...she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn't leaving him, she wasn't going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him.

Endure what one must during the day. But please, can I not have some peace when darkness falls?

You know what you are?" she said. "You're a survivor who has nothing to live for.

How to explain his country to her, he wondered. How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan - that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because there were guards everywhere - that was the purest freedom.

An ending to my story," he said. "My story's ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all.

When he woke in the hospital, he asked, Where's my arm, and the doctors said, Sorry, but we had to amputate, and the captain says, I know my arm is gone, where is it, but they won't tell him. He can feel it, he says, making a fist without him. In the tub, he can feel the hot water with his missing arm. But where is it—in the trash or burned? He knows it's out there, he can literally feel it, but he's got no powers.

Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University.

Adam Johnson

If everyone who had it shitty and bit the dust became a fart," he said, "the world would stink to the treetops, you know what I mean?

robe, snot running freely from her nose. "Go away," she said. "I'm afraid I can't do that," he said. "I

And you could always tell ginger plants whose tap root had penetrated a corpse: the blooms were large, iridescent yellow, and it was hard to jerk loose a plant whose roots had hooked a rib below.

the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in

It's just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone." She

Jun Do saw a look he knew well from childhood, the look of a boy who thought the next day would be better. Those boys never lasted. Still, Jun Do liked them the most.

Someone needs to tell them that they're better off without their coffee tables and photo albums. Some person will have to break it to them that their apartments weren't so great, that losing track of half their relatives is probably for the best. Some shit, though, you got to figure for yourself.

He noted a depth and sadness in Sun Moon's eyes, the faint lines around them bespeaking a resoluteness in the face of loss, and it took everything in him to suppress the memory of Rumina. And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresisitible. How was it that we didn't walk around with every person who mattered tattoed on us forever?

This was the face that Ga had shown the world, that of a boy who had swallowed the things that had happened to him, but who wouldn't understand what they meant for a long, long time.

Let this story be an inspiration when dealing with the weak-minded who share your communal housing blocks and the selfish who use all the soap in your group bathing wells. Know that change is achievable and that happy endings do come, for this story promises to have the happiest ending you will ever hear

The longer the night, the shorter the morning

Acts of heroism are easy—becoming a hero is a bitch.

Nonc is on his side, looking at a boy whose breathing is untroubled for all he's been through, though there's a lack of shine in his eyes, as if the little light in him might someday go out. His breath is clean and perfect, though, sweet-smelling.

The wound of not knowing," Ga said to her. "That's the one that never heals".