Quotes about Resilience

I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.

Don't let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.

Much handled things are always soft(27).

She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her—and the humor with which to live it.

I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)

Difficult to "move on" from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Sethe, he says, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow. He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. You your best thing, Sethe, You are. His holding fingers are holding hers. Me? Me?

Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they brok its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

God take what He would, she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.