Adversity Quotes

"Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way."

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time."

- John Irving

"These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger he will plunge through."

- David Nicholls 'One Day'

"I don't know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every part of my body is broken too."

- Chloe Woodward

"Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated."

- Alphonse de Lamartine

"When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time."

- John Irving

"The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?"

- Philip K. Dick

"What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part."

- Gail Caldwell

"Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air."

- Pablo Neruda

"Sometimes all you can do is lie in bed and hope to fall asleep before you fall apart."

- William C. Hannan

"I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more."

- C.S. Lewis

"Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion to death."

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"A long good-bye is, in many ways, the hardest good-bye of all."

- Linda Staten

"It is always too soon to say good-bye. Even though there is relief at the end of great suffering, that does not dim the sorrow we feel."

- Jeannie Hund

"It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience."

- Julius Caesar

"It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you."

- Charlotte Brontë

"The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, 'O God, forgive me,' or 'Help me.'"

- Billy Graham

"I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Dance has become an exclusionary enterprise. To participate, one must be thinner than thin, of pleasing form, flexible, athletic and young. If you are not all these things, you will be allowed to dance in the privacy of your own living room. You just wouldn’t dare to put yourself onstage."

- Clive Barnes

"Classical dancing is like being a mother: if you’ve never done it, you can’t imagine how hard it is."

- Harriet Cavalli

"Most people think of ballet as children in little tutus. They don’t know it is sweat, blood and tears as well!"

- Nan Keating

"People tend to look at dancers like we are these little jewels, little cardboard cut-outs, and yet we have blood and guts and go through Hell."

- Susan Jaffe

"No farewell words were spoken, no time to say goodbye, you were gone before we knew it, and only God knows why."

"No matter how long it's been, there are times when it suddenly becomes harder to breathe."

"As you navigate through this Tuesday, remember: challenges are what make life interesting, and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful."

"A dance performance is rather like going out into a battlefield. You have to hold the attention of as many as five to 10,000 people a lot of whom do not follow."

"We dancers are very lonely people. We work together but we are very much self-made, self-centered individuals."

"Dancers have a very hard job. We must take our ugly, callused, blistered, and bruised feet and present them in a way so that they are mistaken as the most beautiful things on Earth."

- Anonymous

"Letting go of perfectionism, so ingrained in the nature of a ballet dancer, can be the most difficult thing."

"Common sense would tell parents never to send their children to a ballet school. Common sense would tell teenagers that there is a wider and happier world beyond the grueling strictures of daily barre and class. Common sense would tell the graduating student that there are infinitely superior ways of making money than joining a professional ballet company. Common sense would tell a young dancer that very few (laughably few) of his or her colleagues will ever make it to the top or even near the top. Yet… there remains the dance and the dancer."