Quotes About Resilience

Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?

Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.

Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?

When a hurricane damaged my father's house, my brother rushed over with a gas grill, three coolers of beer, and an enormous Fuck-It Bucket - a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. ("When shit brings you down, just say 'fuck it,' and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.")

I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other.

I fear the good because it will go away … I fear the bad because I'm too weak to withstand it.

If there is one single, clear, and emphatic message I'd like to send with this revised edition, it is that we must pay close attention to the mind-body connection, especially the negative impact of prolonged feelings of helplessness and despair.

I saw myself like a piece of wood floating down a river, suddenly tossed against the shore, caught in a stagnant pool.

But that night I went to sleep, and the next day I was able to go to work and take the necessary steps to begin to face the disease, and to face my life.

The objective, when you have cancer and want to combat fatality, is to make sure you find yourself in the long tail of the curve.

I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.

Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle...

That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.

It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people

Don't confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.

There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.

I see Nic on the plane. I see him as he is - frail, opaque, ill - my beloved son, my beautiful boy. "Everything," I say to him. "Everything." Fortunately there is a beautiful boy. Unfortunately he has a terrible disease. Fortunately there is love and joy. Unfortunately there is pain and misery. Fortunately the story is not over.

Fortunately there is a beautiful boy, unfortunately he has a terrible disease. Fortunately there is love and joy, unfortunately there is pain and misery. Fortunately this story is not over.

The seventh and eighth grade were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I have ever known, what the writers of the bible meant when they used the words hell and pit ...It was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't...It was springtime, for Hitler, in Germany. Anne Lamott

You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it.

Since reason and love, the forces I had come to rely on in my life, have betrayed me, I am in unknown territory.

sometimes a warrior's task is to sit with defeat.

It must be like a soldier in a trench during a bombing raid. I've shut down every nonessential emotion—worry, fear—concentrating every neuron in my new brain on the moment in order to stay alive.

And yet every time I think I can't take any more, I do.