James Clavell Quotes

To be fully human is...to know that it's possible to face the unimaginable and somehow put one foot in front of the other.

Every calamity is to be overcome by endurance.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

The greater the burden a man takes upon his shoulders, the stronger he must be to carry it. No words are unmentionable, no action or horror beyond powers of description, if one is equal to them.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Hope for the best, survive the worst, find humor wherever you can.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

Even with the most horrendous things that happen and the tremendous pain that people have to deal with, they still laugh, because I think that's what it means to be human.

You can't run from Earth, but you can try to get through the day.

In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.

The world is full of horrible things that will eventually get you and everything you care about. Laughter is a universal way to lift your head up and say: 'Not today, you bastards.'

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.

When you can't bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn't you anymore; you've changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.

Laughing can serve you in dark moments and even help you crawl your way back out.

The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here. Yeah. You don't think that's so great. It's okay.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

Strength is nothing more than enduring life - to be able to survive the heartaches and agonies we go through with our heads held high. Sometimes just walking through adversity to get to the other side is a sign of strength.

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!