Quotes About Endurance

Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

I pray silently: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I don't know what it means, but it sounds right, and it will have to do, because I don't know what else I can say to God.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum [...] But what did it mean? I said. What?, he said. Oh, it meant 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. I guess we thought we were pretty smart back then.

After all you've been through, you deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but includes the truth.

Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

and there isn't anything I want to do about the fact that you are unhappy & sick you aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it

Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?

Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be.

This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.

After we're gone the work of our knives will survive us.

How long do you expect me to wait while you cauterize your senses, one after another turning yourself to an impervious glass tower?

Anyway, my dearest one, we still have the moon.

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain

But all would come out fine in the end, she added, because the gods were just. I refrained from saying I'd seen scant evidence of that so far.

what is is, as Grandma Win used to say, and what can't be cured must be endured, and laugh and the world laughs with you but cry and you cry alone.

since his paycheck barely sustained him. As he wryly observed, "the last twenty-nine days of the month were the hardest.

Faith] was something other than an intellectual exercise. There were no words, no lofty concepts, that could take away the pain. Faith was living with the pain.

Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.

as he huffed across the rocky edge.

Junker children, girls as well, were brought up to be tough and bear pain uncomplainingly.

A woman's body doesn't quit just because her heart breaks.

Longing hearts could only stand so much longing.

She could not ignore life. She had to live it and it was too brutal, too hostile, for her even to try to gloss over its harshness with a smile.