Jeannette Walls Quotes

It is not just a person's physical constitution, their intellegence, their education, or even their social conditioning that enables them to withstand hardship. Much more significant is their inner development. And while some may be able to survive through sheer willpower, the ones who suffer the least are those who have a high degree of patience and courage in the face of adversity.

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

In my job, you expect to suffer. That's why when I go to hell one day, it will be less painful for me than you, because I'm used to suffering.

Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down - to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who's never gone through difficulty.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it.

It is not so much the greatness of our troubles, as the littleness of our spirit, which makes us complain.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

I think I was as mentally tough as I've ever been. I felt like I handled the situation both on and off the court extremely well. I felt like I needed to.

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.

The longer I live, the less chance I'll ever recover from what life keeps doing to me.

Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.

There is no such thing in life as no pain and no disappointment.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

I'm attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it.

No day-to-day mishaps or indignities can really compromise your sense of self after you've survived a deep tragedy.

When you see how you react when you suffer that's when you know what you are made of.

People have to learn sometimes not only how much the heart, but how much the head, can bear.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.