Quotes About Strength

I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.

Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.

Thinking is my fighting.

They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines

She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.

Must, must, must — detestable word. Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, Now I am rid of all that, find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to head together, to summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.

But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.

What is nobler, she mused, turning over the photographs, than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way.

And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense.

For nothing [...] is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.

I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care.

Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What then can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: But this is what I see; this is what I see, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.

Heaven be praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation.

I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes.

I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there.

Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitating, trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a whimpering little animal making for the shadow.

And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation.

The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it.