Insurmountable Quotes & Sayings

Imagination is the key to unlocking insurmountable possibilities. — ChristaCarol Jones

This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back. — Suketu Mehta

No obstacles are insurmountable when God commands and we obey. — Heber J. Grant

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was expected to clock in at anywhere between 100 and 120 chapters. Unfortunately, the dude only managed to finish 24 tales before he suffered an insurmountable and permanent state of writer's block commonly known as death. — Jacopo Della Quercia

Love is the most primal force in the universe. It inspires us, pulling us over otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Art is created to exalt it, children are born of it, and entire lives are devoted to seeking it out in the most unlikely places. — C. Robert Cargill

I've done a number of things in the spirit of employee motivation. I tend to be a storyteller and a student of history. I often tell stories of great battles, like the battle of Thermopylae, to inspire teams who face what appear to be insurmountable odds. — Brad D. Smith

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form
or a species
will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap. — Eckhart Tolle

Creation offers proof (for those willing to accept it) of a powerful "Someone" behind the natural world. The astronomical odds against this world happening merely by chance provide insurmountable evidence for a Creator. The intricate beauty and complex design of the creation - from subatomic particles and the molecular building blocks of life to galaxies and the expanses of the universe - demonstrate that a "Designer" planned it all. — Anonymous

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. — Walt Kelly

Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it's not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today. — Amit Chaudhuri

Many people who gain recognition and fame shape their lives by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, only to be catapulted into new social realities over which they have less control and manage badly. Indeed, the annals of the famous and infamous are strewn with individuals who were both architects and victims of their life courses. — Albert Bandura

As our planet faces seemingly insurmountable odds, we must find new ways to survive and thrive together. — Nikhil Advani

When you imagine yourself as a failure or as having insurmountable problems in your relationships or any part of your life, you think failure, act failure, and produce failure. — Chris Prentiss

The future will present insurmountable problems- only when we consider them insurmountable. — Thomas S. Monson

We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen's influence was astonishing - from street style, to music culture and the world's museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss. — Anna Wintour

And whenever you encounter a problem, no matter how insurmountable it might seem, there is one simple response that should be ingrained in your behavior: Never give up. — Stedman Graham

Time is invincible, impregnable, insurmountable, invulnerable, unstoppable and time is invisible. — Jon Jones

I need to dream.
I need to believe.
I need to know that I have some control in my life.
That if I work hard, that I will be rewarded.
That life is not arbitrary.
I need to believe that bad things happen to good people, for a greater reason.
That dedication, sacrifice, hard work, discipline are all worthy attributes that will eventually produce extraordinary results.
That if I live a certain lifestyle, that my family will be better for that.
That there is a direct link between my actions and my results.
That If I prepare properly that I can face the insurmountable foe and look him in the eye and say "Bring it on, I can take whatever you can dish out."
I need to keep living in order to save my daughter from dying. — JohnA Passaro

So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness
united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Distance,
the dissonance insurmountable,
would be not the end,
but a magnet.
When fingertips kiss,
they imprint and cement something,
that cannot be disintegrated.
Time becomes a phantom,
the wind becomes an anchor,
and old dreams- blankets of warmth.
Lull with me, Lady,
there is no greater escape.
Love and war, even when buttered on toast,
still makes for the breakfast of champions. — Dave Matthes

Most fear is fear of the unknown. We do not know what lies ahead of us, so we become apprehensive. Our imaginations can magnify problems until they seem insurmountable. We need a sound mind to see things in proper perspective. That is why God gave us His Holy Spirit, to enable us to see things as God sees them. — Henry T. Blackaby

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. — James Madison

And this gay thing. It feels so big. It's almost insurmountable. I don't know how to tell them something like this and still come out of it feeling like Simon. Because if Leah and Nick don't recognize me, I don't even recognize myself anymore. — Becky Albertalli

Hatred, like a bush fire, ultimately consumes those who propagate it, leaving nothing but scorched, barren earth behind in their hearts. Love, the greatest of reckless endeavours, inspires men to greatness in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds... Maybe this book is just that, a reckless endeavour of the heart. — Stephen Lee

If I could just keep my legs shut I might yet win this battle. It seemed an insurmountable task, given the array of his arsenal. The size of his artillery. One hand dived down further, stroking between my legs, while the other held the back of my head. I was helpless, the battle lost. God, I sucked. — Kylie Scott

I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough
or I misunderstood what strength was. — Claire Messud

If you expect the battle to be insurmountable,
you've met the enemy.
It's you. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there's time. And place. And there's you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I'd love to have done that."
"Richard. You wrote a whole book."
"But everything's left out of it, almost everything. And then I just stuck on a shock ending. Oh, now, I'm not looking for sympathy, really. We want so much, don't we?"
"Yes. I suppose we do."
"You kissed me beside a pond."
"Ten thousand years ago."
"It's still happening. — Michael Cunningham

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language. — Samuel Johnson

How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it. — Vivian Gornick

The tragedy of our seemingly insurmountable ignorance keeps us seeking. — Owen O'Brien

The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable.. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities — Bill Mollison

In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life. — Anton Chekhov

I've been arrested - spent time in lockup with genuinely dangerous guys. I've been in street fights without rules where no one was coming to break it up - and I've won. I've conquered the insurmountable challenge of earning a law degree and dealing with the self-centered jackasses who are my clients without committing aggravated assault. It's a diaper. How hard could it be? I — Emma Chase

Often it isn't the initiating trauma that creates seemingly insurmountable pain, but the lack of support after. — S. Kelley Harrell

Lincoln's appeal to 'the better angels of our nature' failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable — Felix Frankfurter

Any man, you'll soon learn, has an insurmountable need to blame someone else when he is made to look a fool. — Julia Quinn

1. Are her lips like the hot chocolate your mother made
During the winter months when you were seven? Or have you not tasted her well enough to find the fine granules of cocoa that lightly come with each kiss?

2. Do you know her favorite songs? Not when she is happy, but when she is sad. What music reaches inside her ribcage and softly consoles her heart?

3. When she is sad, are you on the phone or are you at her door? Words do not wipe away tears, fingers do.

4. Do you know all the things that keep her up at night? Do you know why she has gone three days without sleep? Do you know of the insurmountable waves of sadness that wash over her like a tsunami?

5. Do you know the things to say that will calm her heartbeat? The places to touch? The places to love?

6. Everytime you see her do you kiss her like it's the last time but love her like it's the first?

7. Do you love her?

8. Do you love her? — Nishat Ahmed

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. — Sam Harris

My experience in Gujarat shows that howsoever big a problem might be, it is not insurmountable if we have the will to act. — Narendra Modi

God's grace is the most incredible and insurmountable truth ever to be revealed to the human heart, which is why God has given us His Holy Spirit to superintend the process of more fully revealing the majesty of the work done on our behalf by our Savior. He teaches us to first cling to, and then enables us to adore with the faith He so graciously supplies, the mercy of God. This mercy has its cause and effect in the work of Jesus on the cross.
13. — John Bunyan

No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only 'good' things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It is not cheap, and it's hard to come by, owing partly to the fact that it is the heir of disappointment, frustration, betrayal and deceit. However, it is not the inheritance that matters so much as what you do with it. In the face of seemingly insurmountable problems what do you do, and why do you do it? The same holds for dramatic characters whose strength, courage, insight and wisdom have to be earned. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

So, besides Ava being lost in a swamp full of homicidal maniacs, and Astrid swimming off to meet the king of homicidal maniacs, what other insurmountable problems are we facing tonight?
- Sera — Jennifer Donnelly

It is unlucky to be stubborn in the face of insurmountable odds — Sun Tzu

Wavering isn't falling. Wavering and going on when you want to fall, when you want to run away and give up--persevering when everything looks hopeless and the odds seem insurmountable--that's what strength is. — Jane Kindred

The best way to move a mountain is one stone at a time. Nothing is insurmountable if you take one step before you take the next. — Debbie Shapiro

Some things in life were truly difficult. Finding the source of the Nile, for example. Or exploring the South Pole. But falling out of love with a man who never looked at her twice, why should that prove an insurmountable challenge? — Sherry Thomas

Horse racing is not so much a business as it is a calling. The work requires too much time and energy to pursue it with anything less than utter passion; and even then, the odds against success can seem practically insurmountable. — Joe Layden

Every clinical encounter is an opportunity to generate social capital. Even in situations where patient needs are complex or seemingly insurmountable, it is the empathy and goodwill which makes the difference. — Tony Tan

Man's will, sustained by an indominable conviction, is much more powerful than material forces that seem insurmountable. — Albert Einstein

Passion is a product of the heart. Passion is what helps you when you have a great dream. Passion breeds conviction and turns mediocrity into excellence! Your passion will motivate others to join you in pursuit of your dream. With passion, you will overcome insurmountable obstacles. You will become unstoppable! — Andy Andrews

When the odds seem insurmountable and it seems impossible to overcome them, most people will give up.The true heroes in this world are those who don't give up in these times when things seem impossible to do. — Dave Brown

There are days when either filmmaking feels like an insurmountable practice - here's a lot of obstacles in the way to make it happen - or you think, "What does this all add up to?" You don't know what to do with the footage, and you've asked a lot of people for their time and a lot of people to be patient with you. And then you lose faith that you can actually make a worthwhile story out of this. — Debra Granik

But the lack of a sense of humor was an insurmountable defect, in my opinion. — Jeaniene Frost

There is an incredible feeling of strength that comes with walking through the fires of Hell and coming out with the prize. The prize, that part of oneself that is rescued, is the confidence that comes with facing down seemingly insurmountable odds and coming out better than when you went in. — Jaq D. Hawkins

When difficulties seem insurmountable, optimists react in a more constructive and creative way. They accept the facts with realism, know how to rapidly identify the positive in adversity, draw lessons from it, and come up with an alternative solution or turn to a new project. Pessimists would rather turn away from the problem or adopt escapist strategies - sleep, isolation, drug or alcohol abuse - that diminish their focus on the problem.9 Instead of confronting them with resolve, they prefer to brood over their misfortunes, nurture illusions, dream up "magic" solutions, and accuse the whole world of being against them. They have a hard time drawing lessons from the past, which often leads to the repetition of their problems. They are more fatalistic ("I told you it wouldn't work. It's always the same, no matter what I do") and are quick to see themselves as "mere pawns in the game of life. — Matthieu Ricard

I've always been attracted to characters with insurmountable odds and obstacles, because innately, however inarticulately I've always believed that my dreams and my desires can command and bend time and space to be the things that I want them to be. — Will Smith

You can certainly have days where you feel your goals are insurmountable. However, you exhibit true tenacity when you can climb toward the insurmountable peak and begin to see the clear skies above. — Richard Keller

As a romance novelist, I have a rather skewed view of babies. You see, they don't typically fit into the classic structure of the romance novel - romance is about two people finding each other and falling in love against insurmountable odds. Babies ... well ... babies are complicated. — Sarah MacLean

I have not looked at Carlos since the meeting ... Being around him is like walking around with the flu ... The need to lie down in a darkened room and let my hatred of him run through me is almost insurmountable. — Kathleen Maher

I never feel more alive than when I'm in great pain, struggling against insurmountable odds and untold adversity. Hardship? Suffering? Bring it! — Dean Karnazes

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun. — Paul Valery

And while I'm sure you feel that your particular mistake is extraordinarily big, insurmountable even, contrary to what you might think, these types of things can always be undone, and oftentimes aren't nearily as lethal as we think - or, should I say, as we allow them to be. — Alyson Noel

The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time. — Albert Einstein

I can't muster a smile. Even with the knowledge that it's dark outside and light up here, it's hard to believe that he can see us. We should be invisible. We are so alone. Mabel and I are standing side by side, but we can't even see each other. In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They're talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don't mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable. — Nina LaCour

The only barrier to human development is ignorance, and this is not insurmountable. — Robert H. Goddard

I loved to observe people.. I watched love and life play out in a million ways, but one of the best things I learned was this: You don't outrun pain.. I saw men and women in those barrooms all trying to outrun something, some pain in their life- and man, they had pain... I saw them all trying to bury that pain in booze, sex, drugs, anger, and I saw it all before I was able to indulge in many of those behaviors myself. I saw that no one outran their suffering; they only piled new pain upon their original pain.. I saw the pain pile up into insurmountable mountains, and I saw the price people paid who buried all that pain, and along with it their hope, joy, and chance at happiness. All because they were trying to outrun the pain rather than walk through it and heal. — Jewel

You are fortunate to be an Aquarius because you are known as the humanitarian zodiac sign. You are progressive in your thinking, which is reflected in every aspect of your life. You do not like being told how to live your life, and you will make your decisions clear to anyone who dares question them. You are energetic, with a zest for life. Unfortunately, society's boundaries can still be insurmountable, even for an Aquarian such as yourself. You are very much in charge of your own destiny and, if something or someone gets in the way of your aspirations, you won't give up on your goals easily. This perseverance earns you respect from others, even if they disagree with what you are hoping to accomplish. — Rosemary Breen

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France. — Max Boot

What is this insurmountable barrier round him? What's it made of? Where did it come from? — Dodie Smith

There's a book that I read, really a great book - it's called 'Lone Survivor' and I think they're trying to make it into a movie. I would love to play Marcus Luttrell, who was the author and the 'lone survivor.' He's a national hero; he's very courageous and heroic in insurmountable danger, so it's something I'd love to explore. — Jared Padalecki

Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of our existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable. — Theodore Zeldin

We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now. — Cass R. Sunstein

The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life. — Sufjan Stevens

One had only to look at the map to see that Panama was the proper place for the canal. The route was already well established, there was a railroad, there were thriving cities at each end. Only at Panama could a sea-level canal be built. It was really no great issue at all. Naturally there were problems. There were always problems. There had been large, formidable problems at Suez, and to many respected authorities they too had seemed insurmountable. But as time passed, as the work moved ahead at Suez, indeed as difficulties increased, men of genius had come forth to meet and conquer those difficulties. The same would happen again. For every challenge there would be a man of genius capable of meeting and conquering it. One must trust to inspiration. As for the money, there was money aplenty in France just waiting for the opening of the subscription books. — David McCullough

The desire for knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experience of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered. — Pope John Paul II

Where were the stars now, whose progress his mother had followed so religiously? Where was the God that she sometimes turned to in her weakest moments? He remembered gazing at the sky in wonder as a child. That was where they told him the dead went. They became stars in the night sky, an insurmountable distance away. — Shitij Sharma

It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed. — Mark Nepo

The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Courage is finding the inner strength and bravery required when confronting danger, difficulty, or opposition. Courage is the energy current behind all great actions and the spark that ignites the initial baby steps of growth. It resides deep within each of us, ready to be accessed in those moments when you need to forge ahead or break through seemingly insurmountable barriers. It is the intangible force that propels you forward on your journey. — Cherie Carter-Scott

The issue of animal use and abuse can seem insurmountable, it is tragic and it is complex. We love our companion animals and we value wildlife but we are generally blind to the realities of what goes into the food we eat. — Liz Marshall

Its not in my nature to go down without a fight even when things seem insurmountable — Suzanne Collins

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived. — Charles Caleb Colton

Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present. — Asa Gray

But my story is as much one of perseverance and drive as it is of talent and luck. I willed it to happen. I took my life in my hands, learned from anyone I could, grabbed what opportunity I could, and molded my success step by step. Fear of failure drove me at first, but as I tackled each challenge, my anxiety was replaced by a growing sense of optimism. Once you overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, other hurdles become less daunting. — Howard Schultz

We should finally note a more radical challenge to the concept of Platonic utility that arises from nascent work in the reinforcement learning field under the rubric of intrinsic motivation. One idea is that the "true" evolutionarily appropriate metric for behavior is the extremely sparse one of propagating ones genes. What we think of as a Platonic utility over immediate rewards such as food or water, would merely be a surrogate that helps overcome the otherwise insurmountable credit assignment path associated with procreation. In these terms, even the Platonic utility is the same sort of heuristic expedient as the Pavlovian controller itself, with evolutionary optimality molding approximate economic rationality to its own ends. It as a sober thought that understanding values may be less important as a way of unearthing the foundations of choice that we might have expected. — Tali Sharot

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all. — Douglas Adams

When faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem... your only option is to act swiftly, some might even say irrationally. Removing the most dangerous elements first... and methodically attacking each subsequent challenge in a separate, but deliberate manner. — Jeph Loeb

Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem. — William Osler

insurmountable problems hit your marriage, being happy becomes an arduous — S. Levine

We all love a good story. We all love a tantalizing mystery. We all love the underdog pressing onward against seemingly insurmountable odds. We all, in one form or another, are trying to make sense of the world around us. And all of these elements lie at the core of modern physics. The story is among the grandest
the unfolding of the entire universe; the mystery is among the toughest
finding out how the cosmos came to be; the odds are among the most daunting
bipeds, newly arrived by cosmic time scales trying to reveal the secrets of the ages; and the quest is among the deepest
the search for fundamental laws to explain all we see and beyond, from the tiniest particles to the most distant galaxies. — Brian Greene

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape. — David Sedaris

We shouldn't take for granted the security and comfort of our neighborhoods, we shouldn't think that always leaving our windows open and our doors unlocked means that we're beyond an encroachment. We may believe our gates are insurmountable and that we're armored by routines, but can't we be touched by chance or fate, plucked up like a mouse foraging along his well-worn trail? Before you know it, you're looking down at the last faint print of your claws in the dirt. — Chang-rae Lee

Powerlessness is an excruciating pain; it is torture insurmountable. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I'm overdosing on the trauma of others, while still barely healing from my own.
I cry for hour at home and have fitful nights of little sleep. My nightmares resurface as my own pain is repeated to me, magnified a thousand times. It feels insurmountable. How can you save everyone? How can you rescue them? How do you get over your pain? How do you ever feel normal? — Rachel Lloyd

[Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first. — Sharon Salzberg

You don't know. You've never been married and divorced. Everything is insurmountable when you're married. The fact that you want to talk at the breakfast table and he insists on reading his paper is insurmountable. Leaving the seat up on the toilet is insurmountable. Getting peanut butter in the jelly jar is insurmountable. People don't change just because they're married. All those little habits and personality quirks that you previously thought were trivial become the bane of your existence. And the major problems, like different outlooks on life, are crushing. — Janet Evanovich

Time perfects all living beings as well as kills them; it alone is awake when all others are asleep. Time is insurmountable. — Chanakya