Elizabeth Edwards Quotations

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.

I think that we're foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can.

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.

A positive attitude is not going to save you. What it's going to do is, everyday, between now and the day you die, whether that's a short time from now or a long time from now, that every day, you're going to actually live.

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.

You recognize a survivor when you see one. You recognize a fighter when you see one.

I'm actually one of those people who get up energetic in the morning.

It takes a lot of work to put together a marriage, to put together a family and a home.

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.

But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.

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.

Cancer is not a straight line. It's up and down.

I'm not worried about me or what's going to happen to me.

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 have a lot that I intend to do in this life.

I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.

I don't expect to get yesterday's medicine. If I can help it, I'd like to get tomorrow's medicine.

I could be wrong, but I think heterosexual marriage is threatened more by heterosexuals. I don't know why gay marriage challenges my marriage in any way.

Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.

I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer. I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I've done the right thing, I will be enlightened. And if I believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me.

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 love children, love spending time with them; I love getting things for them.

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.

Everybody has their burdens, their grief that they carry with them.

In a sense, having cancer takes you by the shoulders and shakes you.

My heart goes out to the grieving parents who lost their two-year-old or their newborn.

Either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying.

I think that it is our intention to deny cancer any control over us.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

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

You never know when something's going to hit you in a particular way and just knock you loose.

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.

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

Growing up in an Italian family, you use a harsh tone and 10 minutes later everybody forgets about it.

My job as the mother of daughters is to make sure my children see that every opportunity is available to them.

You know, I once read a short story about how much you could tell about people from their shoes. You could tell where they had been, what they did, whether they were real walkers.

I have an obligation to try to live as long as I can for my family.

I think being an effective First Lady is first of all being the partner that your husband needs.

To be perfectly frank, there is an odd place after losing a child, where you think somehow your life is worth less.

Everybody makes personal decisions that are right for them and if you're in political life, you're used to having those analyzed.

We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough, but not a lot.

You know, there are no guarantees on prognosis.

I think I did marry a marvelous man.

My job is to stay alive until the medicine and research catch up.

Concentrate on the things that matter to you.

Honestly, I get energized by the crowds. They feed me emotionally.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

I'm a recovering lawyer. The practice of law has changed. Every agreement is a fight.

A lot of people have great hope, and a lot of people who have great hope live. And, some of them who have great hope die. So it's not that hope is going to save you.

One of the things that I think you see sometimes in politics is a certain degree of caution. It's usually advised by consultants who don't want to see you march to the end of a limb.

You know, everybody knows some of what politicians say is malarkey, and having somebody there to call them on it is good. I'd be happy to do that any time and any place.

I took my son's name. I didn't take my husband's name.

A lot of sad stories in a row - that wears on you.

I don't know why someone else's marriage has anything to do with me.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

People find it a great blessing if their child left behind a child.

Sometimes you get politicians who dig their feet into the sand and aren't willing to listen to another voice.

The way campaign funds are distributed are all a matter of record.

Brave people are the firemen who run into the burning building. That's brave.

By what you do, you teach your children how to respond to difficult information.

Every parent has gone through a period when their child wasn't so happy with them.

I can't turn on the television without seeing me, or open the newspaper without seeing me and, honestly, I'm sick to death of me.

I have less energy than I did when I was a younger parent, although I was never really a young parent.

I hope I have important things to say,

I've had experiences that, you know, really couldn't be replaced.

It's just a part of our nature to hope.

Life is this great big blackboard, and on it you write all the things that you do.

Part of what I want to do is sort of reclaim my story - it belongs to me and to my children, who have to live with whoever their mother is.

You wouldn't know I was sick unless you knew I was sick.

Having bought furniture for my own house, and bought furniture for our house in Washington, a furniture store seemed like a good idea, and it also played into my personal history.

I have three living children for whom this is a father who I want them to love and on whom they're going to have to rely if my disease takes a bad turn.

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?

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.

What we hope to achieve is a society that doesn't value a white man because he's a white man, but also doesn't value a woman because she's a woman, or a black because he's a black.

Whenever anyone pulls out of the race, you know, unless they've just been trounced in the days before, there's also - always a lot of questions about why that happened.

If you know someone who has lost a child, and you're afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died-you're not reminding them. They didn't forget they died. What you're reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and that is a great gift.

She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails.

This diagnosis is a reminder that this is the life you've got. And you're not getting another one. Whatever has happened, you have to take this life and treasure and protect it.

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.

At the end of our lives, we will not be judged by the highest public office we attained in our lifetime, if that were true the current president (George W. Bush) would hold as much esteem as Franklin Roosevelt in our country, and Nelson Mandela in his. That cannot be the case. Rather, we will each be judged by the mark we've left on others.

I do know that when my children are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm...and when the wind did not blow her way - - and it surely has not - - she adjusted her sails.

Tabloid news is tabloid news.

... 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.

We have a middle class that lives on a razor blade. So sometimes when you say poverty, you neglect a large portion of the population.

If people think that you're throwing babies out, dissecting children, to do stem-cell research, I'm not for that.

My father had gone to Vietnam.

I do think voters do take into consideration - particularly early state voters - take into consideration a wide range of factors, including electability, and they know that part of electability is the total package that you're presenting.

The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.

Nordie's at Noon is an honest and inspiring testament to [these authors'] experiences which, I am completely confident... will inspire thousands of women as it inspired me.

If I had given up everything that my life was about ... I'd let cancer win before it needed to.

Almost everybody embraces life.

I have a husband who adores me.

I come out of real life.

I want to reclaim who I am.

If I say something that ends up on the front page of Drudge, I haven't done it right.

Those who need a champion cannot afford compromise, in the face of forces that are powerful, persistent and pernicious and greedy.

Compromise today is too often applauded simply for itself. The cost of compromise to principles and real lives doesn't seem to matter.

He seems like a nice charming guy. [Mike Huckabee] doesn't believe in evolution and has some nutty views about what it is we should do about ending violence in our inner city—we should make sure all of our young people are armed. Republicans scare me.

We're all going to die.

Maybe we all change over time.