Quotes about Resilience

I talk with the authority of failure.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye.

Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn't always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?

She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling. Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard. She was crying upon his shoulder. So damned hard, so damned hard, he repeated aimlessly; it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does. Frantic

Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.

What are you looking at? I was just thinking that you're going to be rather happy. Nicole was frightened: Am I? All right--things couldn't be worse than they have been.

Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.

In my 20s, I was going round seeing agents who were patronising because I was fat and a girl, which was a double whammy. I knew what it was to feel out-of-the-loop.

At 26 or 27, I was fatter than anyone.

See failures as learning experiences, not character faults.

We are still fighters.