Elizabeth Edwards

I've often said that the most important thing you can give your children is wings. Because, you're not gonna always be able to bring food to the nest. You're... sometimes... they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves.

I've had to come to grips with a God that fits my own experience, which is, my God could not be offering protection and not have protected my boy.

Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable over something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn't matter.

I'm not a victim - I never want to be perceived that way.

I certainly have a lot to lament, as do we all, everybody has their griefs. But the griefs we can fix, shouldn't we go around fixing them?

... all things are possible if you are willing to put yourself on the line. You cannot stand back and hope for the best. You have to act.

If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was 'over it'. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breathe and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.

I'm part of a community that holds each other up, and it's been great to be held up too.

What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty.

There is nothing about resilience that I can say that my father did not first utter silently in eighteen years of living inside a two-dimensional cutout of himself.

The worst thing to me would be that you put on the face you think people want to see, and then they don't like it and you think, Would they have liked the real me?

You have to have enough respect for other human beings to leave their lives alone. If you admire that life, build it for yourself. Don't just try to come in and take somebody else's life.

I am imperfect in a million ways, but I always thought I was the kind of woman, the kind of wife to whom a husband would be faithful.

You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces - my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined.

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.