Bethany Hamilton Quotes

I'd had episodes before, but I swept them under the carpet. This time, I couldn't do that because everyone knew. I got on with the hard work of getting better and haven't had a blip in almost 10 years.

Of course, I was 19 years old, and I suddenly lost my legs. It was extremely traumatic at the time, but I'm so beyond that. I've done so much with my life.

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.

But my activities have been pretty much focused in the last almost 30 years on the recovery, of my own recovery, the understanding for my family of my recovery.

When you come from so many damaged places you don't ever want to spiral back there, so you gotta continue to check yourself.

When I met Richard Leakey, I thought, 'This is the most charismatic man I've ever met.' He has no legs. He lost them when his plane was sabotaged. But he's an interesting, sort of narcissistic guy.

Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

Give yourself time to get better.

The last couple of years were hell. Like, I can't even tell you, it was so hard. I didn't know how to handle it. But I think I'm in a much better place now, because I stepped away for a second and took a breath. Hollywood is a funny place. It offers so much, but it can also take a lot away from you.

The good news is that by the second year, those cravings were about as half as frequent, and by the third year, half as much again. I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things crooked, I can't complain. After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now than I did ten years ago. I might have some scar tissue, but that's alright, I'm still making progress.

All of us heal in time. The strongest are born again. We only keep the scars we choose to keep.

The pain of yesterday is the strength of today.

I can't imagine trying to be in recovery. I mean it would be hard enough with just life going along in a nice way, but then when awful stuff happens, how you maintain the strength to get through it?

Grateful people may recover faster from trauma.

I was in a very deep, dark slump, and I needed to find a way to get myself out of it. I had to force myself back out into life, back out into experiencing things.

I have this thing I say to myself that 'tomorrow can be better.' And I remember that period in my life where I never felt like tomorrow could be better. It was always dread for the next day.

Oprah is wildly successful, and she's a brilliant businesswoman. She's also somebody who's overcome a ton of demons in her own life, and that's really what shaped her. I think the same could be said for me.

Lance Armstrong, the famous cyclist and more importantly, cancer survivor, has said 'if you ever get a second chance for something, you've got to go all the way.'

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.

Things are better now that the attention has subsided a bit, and I'm happier. Now I can concentrate on what I'm supposed to do, that is, training and running. Despite everything that's happened, I feel like I'm still the same person.

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

What really interests me is how a woman who has had a bad experience with a man comes through it and gets a new life. I feel you have to be positive. You have to say, 'Look, okay, he's ditched you, but there's life after.'