Quotes About Resilience

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.

You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.

If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.

I was for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy.

Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better.

Submission to what people call their 'lot' is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another.

Um auf Dauer gesund zu bleiben, sollte man nie ganz gesund sein

Faced by the accomplished fact, it was really rather useless for him to mind. What was the good of minding the actual and the fininshed? ....to allow oneself to be upset because something had been done which one considers a pity, or even disastrous, is to double the misfortune. Why throw after what is already gone one's own good temper and serenity?

This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,' I remarked, and I wondered what those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the banter of publicans.

I see no use in thinking of painful past things. They ought always to be forgotten as quickly as possible; if they are not, they have a trick of turning the present sour, and I cling to the present, to the one thing one really has, and like to make it as cheerful as possible—like to get, by industrious squeezing, every drop of honey out of it. Just now I cannot tell you how thankful I am simply to be alive with nothing in my body hurting.

The evil times had come of eking out, of making do. At least, my husband seemed to regard the times we had arrived at as evil, but that was because he was in the unfortunate position of having a past to compare them with. I, who had practically no past, and whose family had never fallen from glory for the reason that it had had no glory to fall from, thought the times wholly delightful; and anyhow I rather liked camphor.

Medical problems, job losses, and family breakups had laid these families low. Most had hung on and tried to repay long past any reasonable chance of doing so. As I saw it, the families in bankruptcy were mostly good people caught in a bad situation

I loved my mother. I wanted her to smile, to believe that I was doing the right thing. But that wasn't going to happen. So I ducked my head and kept on going.

Pick your own act of defiance, something that says to you—and to others—that you won't go along with the hate.

When you fight back and win, even in small battles, it makes a difference in who you become. You're better for it. That's what persistence is about. It's a ferocious optimism.

If you don't fight, you can't win.

Sometimes it pays to fight back, even when everyone says it would be better to give up.

And early on I learned that no one gives you anything for free. If you really care about something, if you really want something, you have to fight for it.

But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

Don't know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.

But people need lift, too. People don't get moving, they don't soar, they don't achieve great heights, without something buoying them up.

Von Loewe really should know me well enough by now to realize that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.