99 Quotes to Rekindle Your Inner Resilience
Ninety-nine lines from clinicians, memoirists, and poets for the seasons when you’re rebuilding with whatever is left, grouped into five themes so you can go straight to the one you need.
The Parking Garage at 8 a.m.
She doesn’t go inside right away. The meeting has ended, her laptop bag is in the back seat, and a full inbox is waiting upstairs. She sits in the dim yellow light of the parking garage, engine off, phone in her hand.
She’s scrolling a note on her phone titled, simply, “the list.” Fragments, really. A line she screenshotted at 2 a.m. during the worst of it. A sentence from a grief memoir a friend pressed into her hands six months ago. A quote she can’t remember saving, but apparently needed enough to keep.
She goes inside ten minutes later. Still tired. Still behind on email. But something small has shifted, the way a knot loosens just enough to breathe. She’s an illustrative example, not a real client, but that pause in the car is a common one.
In my work with driven women, I see this pattern often: in moments of overwhelm, the usual forms of help don’t always reach. You can’t take in a podcast. A full chapter asks more than you have. Even conversation asks you to track and respond, which is its own kind of labor. But a single sentence? That you can hold.
What follows are 99 lines from clinicians, researchers, memoirists, and poets who wrote honestly about what endurance asks of us. They’re grouped into five themes: beginning again, the body’s wisdom, the slow build, hope without toxic positivity, and carrying what you carry. You don’t have to read all 99 at once. Go to the section that names where you are.
What Resilience Actually Means
Resilience gets used as a compliment, a job requirement, and sometimes a demand. That’s part of why so many driven women hear the word and feel tired. It helps to start with what the word actually describes, because it’s gentler and more realistic than the way it’s usually sold.
The American Psychological Association’s APA Dictionary of Psychology defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” It’s described as a process, not a fixed trait.
In plain terms: Resilience isn’t something you either have or don’t. It’s what happens when you adapt, bend, and rebuild after something hard, and it can look slow and unglamorous while it’s happening.
That’s different from pushing through. Pushing through keeps you moving at a cost to your body and your relationships, and it often looks like resilience from the outside. Adapting includes grieving what needs to be grieved, resting when rest is required, and asking for help when you reach your limit. Many driven women are experts at the first and were never taught the second.
A term coined by Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, for the zone of arousal in which a person can take in and respond to experience without tipping into overwhelm on one side or shutdown on the other. The window of tolerance can narrow under chronic stress and widen again with safety and support.
In plain terms: It’s the range where you can still think, feel, and respond. When you’ve been running on empty for a long time, that range gets smaller, which is why a short sentence can reach you when a long conversation can’t.
What the Research Says About Rebuilding
Several of the clinicians quoted below have spent their careers on what happens to the body and mind after overwhelming experiences. Peter A. Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger, writes about the energy the body mobilizes under threat and what happens when it has nowhere to go. His work is one reason trauma-informed clinicians pay attention to the body, not only to thoughts.
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, pediatrician and author of The Deepest Well, writes about adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress, and about how early adversity can shape the body’s stress response long after the danger has passed. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, psychiatrist and co-author with Oprah Winfrey of What Happened to You?, describes resilience as a capability that can wax and wane rather than a permanent trait.
Taken together, their work points in the same direction. Resilience isn’t a moral quality. It depends on conditions, and some of those conditions, like safety, rest, and relationships, can be rebuilt. If you want the practical side of that, the guide to nervous system regulation is a good next read.
On Beginning Again
Beginning again is one of the most underrated acts of courage. It rarely feels brave while you’re doing it. It feels like starting over from a place lower than where you thought you’d be. These lines are for the first steps back, when you’re not sure the ground will hold.
“Beyond that, every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers.”
Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022)
“I want to be who I am, going where I’m going, all over again.”
Ada Limón, poet, Bright Dead Things (2015)
“Dwelling on trauma and doing so intensely for a period of time is very important to healing. But eventually all injury has to be given sutures and be allowed to heal over into scar tissue.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Jungian Psychoanalyst and Cantadora, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)
“You are not a reject, although part of you has been rejected. You are not a victim, although part of you has been abused.”
Esther Perel, LMFT, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (2017)
“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997), p. 2
“Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection.”
Deb Dana, LCSW, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018)
“Decades after the mind knows that we are safe, the body still responds as if it were under life threat.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“The autonomic nervous system responds to the challenges of daily life by telling us not what we are or who we are but how we are.”
Deb Dana, LCSW, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018)
“A threatened human (or impala) must discharge all the energy mobilized to negotiate that threat or it will become a victim of trauma. This residual energy does not simply go away.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997), p. 22
“The key to transforming trauma is to move slowly in the direction of flexibility and spontaneity.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997), p. 216
“Each symptom represents a way your brain and body adapted to a chronic condition of threat.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“Tell me I am not the thing my children will have to survive.”
Eugenia Leigh, Gold (2020)
“In mindful recovery, you appreciate the wonderful mystery of being alive without the need for work highs or numbing yourself with multitasking and busyness.”
Bryan E. Robinson, psychotherapist, PhD, Chained to the Desk: A Guidebook for Workaholics, Their Partners and Children, and the Clinicians Who Treat Them (2014)
“Grieving is an irreplaceable tool for resolving the overwhelming feelings that arise during emotional flashbacks. Moreover, grieving is the key process for working through the host of losses that come from growing up in a Cptsd-inducing family.”
Pete Walker, LMFT, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (2013)
“We must grieve the awful fact that safety and belonging was scarce or non-existent in our own families. We need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of our frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from our parents.”
Pete Walker, LMFT, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (2013)
“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different. But we cannot move forward if we’re still holding on to the pain of that past.”
Oprah Winfrey, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021)
“Deep inside us will always be the sad child that we refuse to be.”
Anabel Gonzalez, MD, PhD, It’s Not Me: Understanding Complex Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation (2018)
“When we set a boundary, we let go of being invested in the outcome. This distinguishes boundaries from attempts to control.”
Suzette Boon; Kathy Steele; Onno van der Hart, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists (2011), p. 393
“Forming relationships with survivors of childhood abuse and neglect for the purpose of healing involves risks both for clients and their treaters. Connection requires hope, and hope always carries the risk of disappointment.”
Karen W. Saakvitne; Sarah Gamble; Laurie Anne Pearlman; Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse (2000)
“We think we live in our bodies. But how do many of us really inhabit full-body awareness?”
Manuela Mischke-Reeds, LMFT, Somatic Psychotherapy Toolbox: 125 Worksheets and Exercises to Treat Trauma & Stress (2018)
On the Body’s Wisdom
Resilience isn’t mainly a cognitive achievement. Your body keeps track of what you’ve been through, and it often knows you’re depleted before your mind admits it. These lines come mostly from clinicians who work with trauma and the nervous system, and they treat the body as a source of information rather than a problem to override.
“The risks of hope are disappointment and loss. The risks of trust are betrayal and abandonment. Alongside these risks, however, connection also carries the potential for help, reconnecting with hopes and dreams, and creating meaning, healing and recovery.”
Karen W. Saakvitne; Sarah Gamble; Laurie Anne Pearlman; Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse (2000)
“The body senses danger, and it sets off a firestorm of chemical reactions aimed to protect itself. But most important, the body remembers.”
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity (2018)
“Do not forget that survivors always live with fear. Trauma creates fear. The first legacy of trauma is feeling unsafe (in the world, in relationships, or in one’s body).”
Karen W. Saakvitne; Sarah Gamble; Laurie Anne Pearlman; Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse (2000)
“ACEs and toxic stress thrive on secrecy and shame, both at the individual level and at the societal level. We can’t treat what we refuse to see.”
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity (2018)
“Trust is a confident relationship to the unknown. If we accept that the certainty we long for is something we may never truly have, we can reframe the notion of trust.”
Esther Perel, LMFT, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (2017), p. 298
“In order to know where we are and who we have become despite the trauma, we have to learn how to discriminate between a here-and-now emotional reaction and a feeling or body memory.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“A life after trauma has to include some sense of pride, respect, or just awe that we have survived. We might have to thank those parts of us that contributed to our survival, even if how they (or we) survived is not pretty.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“There’s nothing right or wrong about thoughts. You aren’t being disrespectful by being truthful with yourself about your parents’ emotional limitations.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
“Our injuries do not occur in a vacuum, so our healing cannot occur in one either. Our hurts and losses need to be repaired interpersonally. We cannot heal alone.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“Our bodies adapt to trauma and attachment. A powerful indication of the wisdom of the body is that its movement, posture, and physiology will adapt to our surrounding circumstances, without our conscious intent, to assure our survival and maximize our well-being.”
Pat Ogden; Janina Fisher, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (2014)
“Though problem-solving abilities and insight can be of some help, the cost of the self-protective mechanisms we have developed in the face of adverse experiences is often that we lose touch with the potential for healing and growth that can be found through listening to our bodies.”
Pat Ogden; Janina Fisher, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (2014)
“Recovering from long and difficult experiences is not the same as finishing a ten-day course of antibiotics. It’s a process that will always be part of our lives, since we are constantly evolving, and so are the situations we find ourselves in.”
Anabel Gonzalez, MD, PhD, It’s Not Me: Understanding Complex Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation (2018), p. 168-169
“From our present reality, we look at the children that we once were with understanding, and see the sensations that were brought on by what we lived through and the reactions that we were able to have, and those we couldn’t have.”
Anabel Gonzalez, MD, PhD, It’s Not Me: Understanding Complex Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation (2018)
“Our experiences are remembered in networks of interconnected neural patterns that can later create maladaptive ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that may form prisons of the mind, forcing us to live in automatic ways we may believe we cannot change.”
Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine, endorsement of Francine Shapiro, PhD’s Getting Past Your Past (2012)
“Even the healthiest of relationships have moments of disconnection or unintentional misunderstanding. A healing relationship will allow you to stay in the relationship until connection is regained and the relationship bond is repaired.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole (2016)
“When you’ve been steeped in shame for your entire life, it’s hard to accept that much of what you were taught about yourself is wrong.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the ‘triggering’ event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997), p. 271
“Estrangement can leave you feeling isolated, overwhelmed, and wary of connection. However, you aren’t alone. There are caring people who can truly understand your pain, and reaching out to them for emotional support can help.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 81
“There is a difference between knowing and understanding. I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding.”
Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022)
“Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes.”
Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022)
On the Slow Build
The most honest resilience isn’t a single dramatic act. It’s built in small, repeated moments: a boundary held, a feeling allowed, a morning you got through. These lines are about pace, grief, and self-trust, which tend to come back gradually rather than all at once. If your recovery feels slower than you want it to be, you’re in the right section.
“There is a difference between thinking you deserve to be happy and knowing you are worthy of happiness. So often we block our blessings because we don’t, at our core, feel that we’re enough.”
Oprah Winfrey, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021)
“The effects of my treatment by those who were supposed to care for me weren’t strictly emotional. There was also a biological response. Through my work with Dr. Perry, my eyes have been opened to the fact that although I experienced abuse and trauma as a child, my brain found ways to adapt.”
Oprah Winfrey, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021)
“All of us can in one way or another overcome our personal, familial and even social histories. We can move beyond these painful issues and embrace life fully without these old memories dragging us down.”
Francine Shapiro, PhD, Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy (2012), p. 276
“Most clients with a history of trauma, especially those grappling with dissociation, find living inside their own skin challenging.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021), p. 171
“In each trauma client I have met there is both a dread of trauma symptoms and a deep desire to come back to a holistic sense of self.”
Manuela Mischke-Reeds, LMFT, Somatic Psychotherapy Toolbox: 125 Worksheets and Exercises to Treat Trauma & Stress (2018)
“The adult should understand what the child needed at the time of the trauma. This question is in itself a change of perspective, very relevant when nobody was attentive to the child’s needs and experience.”
Anabel Gonzalez; Dolores Mosquera, EMDR and Dissociation: The Progressive Approach (2012)
“If you are tearful, it does not mean that you are broken, bad, weak, stupid, or a baby. The stuff that is coming up is the stuff you have been hiding from your whole life. Be kind and gentle with yourself. Insist that you think of yourself with respect and dignity.”
Anna B. Baranowsky; J. Eric Gentry, Trauma Practice: A Cognitive Behavioral Somatic Therapy (2023), p. 138
“Loss still hurts even if you choose it.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“Grieving an estrangement is quite different from grieving the death of a loved one. Estrangement is a unique form of loss for which the losses are not always tangible or easy to describe.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 41
“Tears can also help us realize that our loneliness is now causing us much unnecessary pain. This in turn can motivate us to open to the possibility of finding safe connections.”
Pete Walker, LMFT, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (2013)
“Grieving involves letting go. However, releasing traumatic memories can sometimes feel at first like you are letting go of any last remnants of hope for redemption.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole (2016)
“By being open about ACEs with friends and family, people are normalizing adversity as a part of the human story and toxic stress as a part of our biology that we can do something about.”
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity (2018)
“Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my feet will always be ready to run.”
Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022)
“The tsunami of shame sets off every alarm bell in the body, igniting an intense cauldron of seething self-criticism, self-hatred, and every other painful self-attack.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“Trauma interrupts the process of building the autonomic circuitry of safe connection and sidetracks the development of regulation and resilience.”
Deb Dana, LCSW, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018)
“After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)
“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)
“Having a boundary is an aspect of self-respect that allows you to assert your “no” and your “yes.” Without a boundary, you will be more likely to give in to others because you long for approval.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole (2016)
“Self-trust is the ability to trust your own perceptions and judgment. When you trust yourself, you have confidence in your decisions even if others disagree.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“Rebuilding self-trust involves tuning in to your experiences and courageously choosing to believe yourself, even when no one else does.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
On Hope Without Toxic Positivity
Hope that asks you to deny what hurts doesn’t last. The hope that holds up is the kind that looks straight at the difficulty and still leaves room for something else. These lines don’t ask you to cheer up. They ask you to stay, and some of them ask harder questions about why so many people are hurting in the first place.
“Boundaries are a fundamental form of self-protection, and we all have the right to safeguard our physical and mental well-being.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“Trauma survivors need to feel safe in order to heal; they need to feel some sense of control over their lives now; and they do not need to feel small or less than others or ashamed.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“Once understood as “you have to be stable to face the trauma,” we now understand the prioritization of safety and stability in a different way. It means the discovery that “you have to be here now and you have to be safe now in order for the trauma to feel over.””
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“Shame is a wound of not belonging. It can leave you feeling like an exile, a stranger in a strange land.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“Why do we repeat painful emotional and behavioral patterns across generations? Transgenerational trauma is often carried forth through implicit memories that hold experiences of the past in the form of sensations and emotions.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Jungian Psychoanalyst and Cantadora, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)
“Sooner or later, sorrow will grow and overshadow everything else. If this is our case, we have to practice doing things for the simple pleasure of doing them, without worrying about whether or not they are useful for us.”
Anabel Gonzalez, MD, PhD, It’s Not Me: Understanding Complex Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociation (2018), p. 143
“In order for suffering and hope to have meaning, however, they must be grounded in something or someone larger than the fragile ego. Call it Fate, God, Energy, Love, or Prana.”
Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (1982)
“You can miss someone and not want them back in your life.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 43
“Even as your heart takes you through many messes, the purpose is to bring you back home to yourself in a solid, powerful way.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“Boundaries are the limits that help you to define yourself, and without them, it becomes harder to feel where you begin and end.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“Many women learn that fallow periods can be healing respites that precede a surge of activity or creativity, only after they have learned to accept them as a phase and not a sin.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen, psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, Goddesses in Everywoman (1984)
“It is the Inner Mind that needs to feel its own strength. Dip into the Pool of Memory and find treasure. Do not be in a hurry.”
Doreen Valiente, Author and High Priestess, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (2018)
“Resilience is a capability that can wax and wane, not a permanent, innate trait.”
Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021)
“Healing cycles can only be opened up to, watched, and validated; they cannot be evaluated, manipulated, hurried, or changed. When they get the time and attention they need, they are able to complete their healing mission.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997)
“The pain of grief causes people to reach out for others who are lost. Without it there would probably be no societies or cultures. No one would look after those who are sick, would search for loved ones who are lost, or would stay with people who are difficult at times.”
Marsha M. Linehan, PhD, ABPP, Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder
“I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.”
Natalie Diaz, poet, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)
“they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.”
Natalie Diaz, poet, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)
“Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”
Ada Limón, poet, The Carrying (2018)
“The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. You hand me two children, two roses.”
Sylvia Plath, poet, Ariel (1965)
Both/And: Quotes Are Not Enough, and They Matter Anyway
A quote can’t repair an attachment wound, integrate a traumatic memory, or rewire a nervous system shaped by years of chronic stress. That work takes depth: often therapeutic support, body-based work, community, and time. And yet a single sentence, found at the right moment, can interrupt the spiral. It can return you, even briefly, to yourself.
Both things are true. The quotes matter and they aren’t enough. They can hold you in the parking garage for ten minutes, and they can’t do the deeper work for you. One is within easy reach. The other takes longer and usually takes company.
Many driven women dismiss what feels small. The quotes, the walks, the five minutes of quiet. They wait to feel better through the bigger interventions, and meanwhile the small things, the ones that take thirty seconds and cost nothing, go unused.
I’m not suggesting you skip the deeper work. I’m suggesting you also use the quotes. Save the ones that land. Return to them. Neither cancels out the other.
The Systemic Lens: Whose Resilience Gets Celebrated
Resilience has been stretched to mean something it never meant. A word that describes the capacity to adapt and recover gets used by workplace culture and hustle ideology to mean: keep going no matter what the circumstances are doing to you. It gets used to ask more of people who are already carrying more, and to let systems off the hook for the conditions they create.
When we celebrate individual resilience without looking at the structures that make it necessary, we put the whole burden of surviving those structures on the individual. We tell workers to be resilient rather than asking for fair conditions. We tell trauma survivors to recover faster rather than asking why so much harm happens in the first place.
Bruce D. Perry’s point that resilience can wax and wane matters here. If it rises and falls with conditions, then exhaustion isn’t proof that you’re failing. It may be an accurate reading of what you’ve been asked to carry, and a useful question to bring to the systems around you.
In my work with driven women, much of what they carry isn’t only personal. Intergenerational patterns. The exhaustion of working inside systems that weren’t designed with their wellbeing in mind. The particular strain of ambition in a culture that rewards output and ignores interior life. Of course they’re tired. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a fair accounting of the terrain.
So read these quotes as part of a lineage, not a solo prescription. You’re borrowing from a much larger store of human endurance than your current hardship. You’re not the first to move through this kind of fire, and you’re not alone in it.
On Carrying What You Carry
Some of what you carry won’t be set down anytime soon. These last lines come mostly from poets, and they don’t tidy anything up. They name grief, rage, loss, and the strange tenderness of surviving, and they let those things be as big as they are. If you’ve been looking for words that don’t rush you, start here.
“Sometimes I feel an underground river forcing its way between deformed cliffs an acute angle of understanding moving itself like a locus of the sun into this condemned scenery.”
Adrienne Rich, poet, Diving into the Wreck Poems 1971-1972 (1973)
“no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.”
Adrienne Rich, poet, Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
“I did not beg him to stay because I was begging God that he would not leave.”
Warsan Shire, poet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011)
“In the mass graves, a woman’s hand caged in the ribs of her child, a single stone in Spain beneath olives, in Germany the silent windy fields, in the Soviet Union where the snow is scarred with wire, in Salvador where the blood will never soak into the ground, everywhere and always go after that which is lost.”
Carolyn Forché, poet, The Country Between Us (1981)
“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
Mary Oliver, poet, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (2005)
“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again.”
Richard Siken, poet, Crush (2005)
“It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, / it’s more like a room where you can’t find the door.”
Richard Siken, poet, Crush (2005)
“You take the things you love / and tear them apart”
Richard Siken, poet, Crush (2005)
“if a house / does not / automatically / make a home, / then a body / doesn’t / automatically / make a home / either.”
Amanda Lovelace, poet, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (2016)
“once upon a time, / the princess / rose from the ashes / her dragon lovers / made of her / & crowned / herself / the / mother-fucking / queen of / herself.”
Amanda Lovelace, poet, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (2016)
“Loving Ophelia Is / loving a ghost and loving a ghost is loving yourself / and loving yourself is a sudden sorrow”
Jenny Molberg, poet, Refusal (2020)
“The new therapist wants a list of compliments I’d give myself on behalf of those who love me, / and all I can come up with is resourceful.”
Safia Elhillo, poet, Girls That Never Die (2022)
“i was born / i was planted / at the rupture the root where / land became ocean became land anew / i split from my parallel self”
Safia Elhillo, poet, Girls That Never Die (2022)
“Mother Goddess is reawakening, and we can begin to recover our primal birthright, the sheer, intoxicating joy of being alive.”
Starhawk, Author and Ecofeminist, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1999)
“A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“grief / clung to her / like an old, / itchy, faded, / ill-fitting, hand-me-down / dress.”
Amanda Lovelace, poet, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (2016)
“And yet, you are someone I used to know, / someone I still know. / Jenny light, Jenny darkness. You misremember / a line of our old favorite poem, / and a scalpel of light goes in through my ribs.”
Jenny Molberg, poet, Refusal (2020)
“We do not rid ourselves of these things / even when we are cured of personal silence”
Carolyn Forché, poet, The Country Between Us (1981)
“this place makes me / the kind of exhausted that has / nothing to do with sleep / and everything to do with / the people around me”
Rupi Kaur, poet, The Sun and Her Flowers
I don’t know which of these sentences will land for you, or when. Maybe one hits right now and you screenshot it. Maybe you come back to this page in three months, in a different kind of hard, and find the one that matters then. If you want more, the collection of uplifting quotes for hard times is another place to look.
What I want you to carry is this: you’re allowed to let words hold you. You’re allowed to take ten minutes in the parking garage. You’re allowed to feel whatever this season has genuinely cost you. Resilience isn’t the absence of that cost. It’s the willingness to keep accounting for it honestly, and to keep moving even when forward doesn’t look like what you expected.
If what’s underneath this search is bigger than a list of quotes can hold, you don’t have to carry it alone. Fixing the Foundations is my self-paced course for relational trauma recovery, the article archive has more on resilience and recovery, and you can reach out about working together. You don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support. Sometimes being tired is reason enough.
Warmly,
Annie
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Uplifting Quotes for Hard Times
Lines from writers and clinicians for the stretches when getting through the day is the goal.
40 Reasons to Keep Going When You Don’t Think You Can
Reasons to stay for the moments when the next step feels impossible.
Frequently asked questions.
What is the difference between resilience and just pushing through?
Pushing through is a survival strategy that keeps you moving at a real cost to your body and your relationships. Resilience, as the APA Dictionary of Psychology describes it, is the process of adapting to difficult experiences with flexibility. In practice that includes grieving what needs to be grieved, resting when rest is required, and asking for help at your limit. Many driven women are expert at pushing through and were never taught what adapting looks like.
Why do quotes about resilience help during hard times?
When you’re in distress, your own words can go offline. A quote that names what you’re living through can create a felt sense of being seen, as if someone else has stood where you’re standing. A well-chosen line can give you permission to stop arguing with your own experience, even for a moment.
Can reading resilience quotes support trauma recovery?
They can be one tool among many. They won’t process unresolved trauma, which usually takes deeper therapeutic work. But they can act as anchors, interrupting a catastrophizing spiral and returning you, briefly, to the part of you that knows this won’t last forever. Some people keep a short list on their phone for exactly those moments.
What does inner resilience mean psychologically?
Resilience isn’t a character trait you either have or don’t. The American Psychological Association describes it as the process and outcome of adapting to difficult or challenging experiences. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, describes it as a capability that can wax and wane. That means it can be depleted, and it also means it can come back.
How do I rebuild inner resilience when I feel completely depleted?
Start with evidence: notice what you’ve already survived, not to minimize what’s hard now, but as a reminder that your capacity is larger than this moment suggests. Find one person, one practice, or one resource that connects you to something beyond the immediate crisis. And treat deep depletion as information. It may mean the load you’re carrying is more than one person should carry alone.
Why do some resilience quotes feel hollow while others land?
A quote tends to land when it names your specific experience rather than offering generic encouragement. The hollow ones prescribe feeling better. The ones that hold you usually witness the difficulty instead. They don’t ask you to reframe the pain. They acknowledge that it’s real and that someone survived it anyway.
Are there therapy options for women struggling to find their resilience?
Yes. Trauma-informed therapy works with the nervous system patterns that wear resilience down over time. Annie Wright, LMFT, offers individual therapy for driven women healing from relational trauma. She’s licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado for telehealth only, and registered to provide telehealth in Florida under Fla. Stat. 456.47. You can reach out through the connect page.
What if a hard season includes thoughts of not wanting to be here?
Please don’t carry that alone. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists local crisis services. Quotes can keep you company, but they aren’t a substitute for crisis support.
References.
- American Psychological Association. “Resilience.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/resilience.
- Burke Harris, Nadine. The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
- Levine, Peter A., with Ann Frederick. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
- Perry, Bruce D., and Oprah Winfrey. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. New York: Flatiron Books, 2021.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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