Quotes About Strength

I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.

There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits.

Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

the unbearable persistence of hope

It's not something to fix," he said. "It means strong. Outside of all expectation." I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, "You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I'm saying you are that driver.

Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace.

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.

He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. She was going ahead.

Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!

I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.

What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.

Whatever it is, you can live through it, and it ends.

that mothers' and daughters' hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves.

I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.

I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.

Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.

Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.

Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always.

To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.

Brain of a deer tick, but that's not something to hold against a running back.

Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.

It is in his absence I prosper.