“Or, God, maybe this was just life. For everyone on the planet. Maybe the Survivors’ Club wasn’t something you ‘earned’, but simply what you were born into when you came out of your mother’s womb.
Your heartbeat put you on the roster and then the rest was just a question of vocabulary: The nouns and verbs used to describe the events that rocked your foundation and sent you flailing were not always the same as other people’s, but the random cruelties of disease and accident, and the malicious focus of evil men and nasty deeds, and the heartbreak of loss with all its stinging whips and rattling chains…at the core, it was all the same….
The essential truth of life, he was coming to realize, wasn’t romantic and took only two words to label: Shit. Happens. But the thing was, you kept going. You kept your friends and your family and your mate as safe as you were able. And you kept fighting even after you were knocked down. Goddamn it, you dragged your ass off the ground and you kept fighting.”
Lover Mine, J.R. Ward
I love this quote so much because it speaks to what we all have in common. Our circumstances may be different, but we all face challenges that completely ground us. Then we do the only thing we can do – we get back up. We drag our asses off the ground and we keep fighting. Shit happens, true, but humans (and vampires, in this case) have resilience. We draw upon that and we stand up again and we face life, knowing that it’s just going to knock us down another time. But we keep fighting, and I think that’s remarkable.