Adversity Quotes

"It is one thing, I was discovering, to think, “Maybe I won’t have kids” and quite another to be told, “Maybe you can’t.” This is how impatience turns to desperation."

- Peggy Orenstein

"Women often endure infertility, pregnancy, infant loss, miscarriages and stillbirths in isolation, because while sadness is a socially palatable response to these often life-altering events, rage, frustration, jealousy and guilt are not."

- Soraya Chemaly

"The world was selfish, unjust. How could so many undeserving people be given the opportunity to raise children they didn’t even want while so many worthy individuals didn’t get the chance?"

- Brittainy C. Cherry

"Is there anyone dearer than the children of people you love, especially when you don’t have your own?"

- Lisa Unger

"There’s a unique pain that comes from preparing a place in your heart for a child that never comes."

- David Platt

"What starts out as a dream becomes a project that’s all-consuming—everywhere you look, women are pregnant and every song on the radio seems like it’s all about being pregnant! It becomes a very frustrating, frightening place."

- Brooke Shields

"Anyone that’s been in the place of wanting another child or wanting a child knows the disappointment, the pain and the loss that you go through trying and struggling with fertility."

- Nicole Kidman

"Getting pregnant wasn't easy and I found that devastating. I really beat myself up for waiting so long when I’d always wanted children and family had been the basis of my happiness my whole life."

- Emily Procter

"There are definitely times when I walked out [of the doctor’s office] hysterically crying, and other times when I was like, ‘OK, everything’s looking good—it’s going to be this month!’ The waiting and waiting has been a roller coaster."

- Kim Kardashian

"After going through a lot of procedures and spending a lot of money, the doctor said, ‘Look, based on what we’re seeing here, I just don’t think this is going to happen for you.’ The hardest part is I really love my husband—he’s such a good person and he would be such a great father. But we just decided it wasn’t worth it to go through that and so we decided to stop. It was better to not go through that torture."

- Aisha Tyler

"John and I were having trouble. We would have kids five, six years ago if it had happened, but my gosh, it’s been a process! We’ve seen fertility doctors and then once you open up about all those things to other people, you start learning that a lot of other people in your life are seeing these people and they have this shame about it."

- Chrissy Teigen

"We tried to have another child, it didn’t work and I went into a deep clinical depression. It’s only now that I no longer count other people’s children or judge myself harshly for not providing my daughter with a sibling."

- Emma Thompson

"What doesn’t KILL me makes me stronger… Except for the extinction of COFFEE… that might kill me."

- Tanya Masse

"Too often the only escape is sleep"

- Charles Bukowski

"I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in."

- Nicole Krauss

"Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."

- Mitch Albom

"A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment."

- Douglas Adams

"People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around."

- Douglas Adams

"When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together."

- John Berger

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves."

- Erich Fromm

"In young women, I find that a feeling of anxiety is normal and moves to the forefront of repressed feelings when the possibility of fulfilment of the wish first appears. It is a well-defined form of anxiety: You feel that the enemy is within; its characteristic ardour compels you, with inflexible urgency, to do what you do not want to do; you feel the end, the transient, before which you vainly may attempt to flee to an uncertain future. You might ask: Is this all? Is this the high point with nothing more beyond?"

- Sabina Spielrein

"Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child."

- Anna Freud

"There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves."

- Anna Freud

"The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved."

- John Bowlby

"Infertility is a loss. It's the loss of a dream. It's the loss of an assumed future. And like every loss, it will be grieved."

- Unknown

"Coffee before Conciousness Why do people worry more if you argue with your voices than if you just talk with them? What about if you lose those arguements? Slowly going crazy at work... they found a way to make the voices work too."

- Unknown

"Thus, we take it for granted that, when a relationship to a special loved person is endangered, we are not only anxious but are usually angry as well. As responses to the risk of loss, anxiety and anger go hand in hand. It is not for nothing that they have the same etymological root."