Quotes About Resilience

There are bugs and snakes and rodents.

Read your Bible, child; this world is not a paradise but a vale of tears.

She knew this to be true. Maybe not tonight, but some night soon. She was not afraid of death, in theory. If anything, she had nothing but respect and reverence for the Genius of Death, who had shaped this world more than any other force. That said, she did not wish to die quite this moment. She still wanted to see what would happen next, as much as ever. The thing was to resist submersion for as long as possible.

The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.

It was an adventure. You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Someone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there's no war, and then there's another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person—and where's the good in that?

The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

Bravery means doing something scary.

La vida te enseñará que no hay que tomarse las cosas tan en serio, querida. El mundo no para de cambiar. Aprende a aceptarlo. Las personas hacen promesas y luego las rompen.

So the question is not so much "What are you passionate about?" The question is "What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?

It should have been unbearable to face this sorry inventory, yet for some reason it was not.

Ovau teie! Toa hai a'e tau metua i ta 'oe! E 'ore tau 'somore e mae qe ia 'eo! ~ Alma Whittaker

Because God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies (or however the old adage goes), some wonderful things did happen to me in the shadow of all that sorrow.

Because the truth of the matter is, most people don't finish things! Look around you, the evidence is everywhere: People don't finish. They begin ambitious projects with the best of intentions, but then they get stuck in a mire of insecurity and doubt and hairsplitting . . . and they stop. So if you can just complete something—merely complete it!—you're already miles ahead of the pack, right there.

they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

Everything is so goddamn scary. Defending

Ruin is the Road to Transformation

I noticed that my fear never changed, never delighted, never offered a surprise twist or an unexpected ending. My fear was a song with only one note—only one word, actually—and that word was "STOP!" My fear never had anything more interesting or subtle to offer than that one emphatic word, repeated at full volume on an endless loop: "STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!" Which

I am very empty in the bank since the bomb.

I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue

Another woman, though, who has managed to keep her vibrant career thriving even with three kids, and who sometimes takes her children with her on overseas business trips, said, "Just go for it. It's not that hard. You just have to push against all the forces that tell you what you can't do anymore now that you're a mom.

there came a point in my life when I stopped doing this—when I stopped responding to life's challenges with floods of tears. Because really, there is no dignity in it. These days, I am the sort of tough-skinned old battle-ax who would rather stand dry-eyed and undefended in the most hostile underbrush of truth than degrade herself and everyone else by collapsing into a swamp of manipulative tears.

By all means, do not let me or anyone else ever take away your suffering, if you're committed to it!

Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

I believe that life cannot be survived—that is evident!—but if one is lucky, life can be endured for quite a long while. If one is both lucky and stubborn, life can sometimes even be enjoyed.