Quotes About Endurance

To fight on the winning side was one thing; to survive, quite another.

And if she had not come back to me...if you had not come...if I had known for sure that both of you were dead...Then I would still have lived...and done what must be done. So will you.

The body is amazingly plastic. The spirit, even more so. But there are some things you don't come back from. Say ye so, a nighean? True, the body's easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled—yet there's that in a man that is never destroyed.

I can bear pain, myself, but I could not bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.

Not loneliness, but solitude. Not suffering, but endurance, the discovery of grim kinship with the rocks and sky. And the finding here of a harsh peace that would transcend bodily discomfort, a healing instead of the wounds of the soul.

I was dead, my Sassenach – and yet all that time, I loved you.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it. So.

I can bear pain, myself," he said softly, "but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.

True, the body's easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled - yet there's that in a man that is never destroyed.

Nadie se muere por eso. Ni tu, ni yo»

There comes a turning point in intense physical struggle where one abandons oneself to a profligate usage of strength and bodily resource, ignoring the costs until the struggle is over. Women find this point in childbirth; men in battle. Past that certain point, you lose all fear of pain or injury. Life becomes very simple at that point; you will do what you are trying to do, or die in the attempt, and it does not really matter much which.

I had realized many years before why "patients" are called that; it's because a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are not sick.

Gave me terrible cramps, and I had wind for days.

I have lived through a fucking world war," I said, my voice low and venomous. "I have lost a child. I have lost two husbands. I have starved with an army, been beaten and wounded, been patronized, betrayed, imprisoned, and attacked. And I have fucking survived!" My voice was rising, but I was helpless to stop it. "And now should I be shattered because some wretched, pathetic excuses for men stuck their nasty little appendages between my legs and wiggled them?!

Sassenach… I love ye now, and I will love ye always. Whether I am dead – or you – whether we are together or apart. You know it is true, he said quietly, and touched my face. "I know it of you, and ye know it of me as well.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.

Aye, I ken fine how strong women are," he said quietly. "And you're strong enough for what must be done, m' annsachd—believe me.

And the light was gone, and the air failed them. And so they lay down in the dark to die.

That's how ye do it,' his brother Ian had told him... 'Ye find a way to live for that one more minute. And then another. And another... But after a time, ye find ye're in a different place than ye were. A different person than ye were. And then ye look about and see what's there with ye. Ye'll maybe find a use for yourself. That helps.

But the years between now and then had been hard ones—and compassion was a soft emotion, easily eroded by circumstance.

Until we two be burned to ashes.

And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed.

We jolted along for a couple of hours in this manner, but the pain grew steadily worse, keeping me shifting in the saddle incessantly.

Then ye live with it, laddie, he said softly. That's all.