Austin Grossman Quotes

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

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.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.

Wheels come off? Get on with it. Cope. Survive.

Both 'Saturday Church' and 'Pose' are incredible because they demonstrate something essential about survival. When you get pushed hard enough by certain circumstances, your survival mechanism kicks in, and you grow into the things that you need or are missing in your life.

Grace changes us and change is painful".

I shake my head, but I can’t change this. I can only bear the scars, as I have always done, as I ever do.

The thing that matters is not what you bear, but how you bear it

We are powerful because we have survived

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight!

You're never given more pain than you can handle. You never, ever get more than you can take.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

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.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

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.

Surviving means being born over and over.

Accustom yourself to that which you bear ill, and you will bear it well.

As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.

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

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

Tragedy brings change, and that's what I'm interested in most - how people plunge into change and try to fight, then eventually move with it with grace.