Quotes About Strength

Thursday, 6 July, 1944 ... Quite honestly, I can't imagine how anyone can say: I'm weak, and then remain so. After all, if you know it, why not fight against it, why not try to train your character? The answer was: Because it's so much easier not to! This reply rather discouraged me. Easy? Does that mean that a lazy, deceitful life is an easy life? Oh no, that can't be true, it mustn't be true, people can so easily be tempted by slackness...and money.

March 16, 1944 ...Kitty, Anne is crazy, but then these are crazy times and even crazier circumstances. March 17, 1944 Even though I'm only fourteen, I know what I want, I know who's right and who's wrong, I have my own opinions, ideas and principles, and though it may sound off coming from a teenager, I feel I'm more of a person than a child - I feel I'm completely independent of others.

I am young and strong and living a great adventure

Oh, when will we overcome all these difficulties? And yet it's good that we have to surmount them, since it makes the end that much more beautiful

My life here has gotten better, much better. God has not forsaken me, and He never will.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.

Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)

You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.

It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength.

When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again.

There is cracks, cracks, in everything, that's how the light gets in.' I had cracks but not the hope.

But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.

It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

He lost the great big outward thing, the good- looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brillian mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue yes, those beautiful hands.