Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

The rocky time came right after I left school. I spent a lot of time at night navigating the streets of Paris trying to find something to eat.

Change is never easy.

At the narrow passage there is no brother and no friend

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

Yes it's difficult. Yes it's horrible. Yes it's the worst thing that has ever happen in my whole life. But I just can't give up.

Another roof, another proof.

Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.

Christina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends—one, a 91-year-old survivor of the grinding poverty of rural Ireland, immigrant New York and the hardscrabble Midwest; and the other, a casualty of a string of foster homes—each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. Orphan Train will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold.

I think that everybody does hustle in order to survive. That doesn't mean lying - it's more about how you handle situations.

...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.

But what is to be done? Is it possible to infect ourselves on purpose just in order to have the satisfaction of dying beautifully and tranquilly? No! What is to be done? We must live while we are alive, eat dry bread if there is no roast beef, know many women if it is not possible to love a woman, and, in general, we must not dream about orange trees and palms, when under foot are snowdrifts and the cold tundra.

You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.

Life is not for the faint of heart.

All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

I can honestly say from my experience, my family and I had to start from scratch. We left Venezuela back in 1998 and sold the few things we had to come to America in search of the American dream. We went through really tough times. There were moments where we were wondering are we going to make it.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

We got to pray just to make it today.

If the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.

It is the greatest of all mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so.

Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.

It's hard to get by just upon a smile.