Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

There are young people all over the country who don’t always have the helping hand, the second chance that I had.

I grew up poor in East Houston. I used to be ashamed of it, but I'm not anymore. It's kind of a badge of courage now.

I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.

I want people to use my story to stand up, be strong-willed and persevere.

I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.

If you look at me outside the cricket ground, I am a simple, normal guy, like everyone else. But on the field, that passion flows because I have been through a lot of tough times and have lost many special people.

I was born into long odds. I know what the David versus Goliath story is. My life has been that.

There have been some dark times. But what I've realised is that I love this sport.

'IronE' stands for an eagle in flight with an unbroken spirit. I coined that term because it is indicative of my life story and the fact that I'm out of the inner city.

I like to keep fighting in the bad moments and I will never say I am done.

My brokenness has made me become more primal, more instinctual.

Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.

I have found that people who have a passion or a strong will for what they want to achieve, and who do not allow others to smear or sully their inner pictures of what they want to manifest, always seem to get what they desire in their lives.

Defeat may serve as well as victory To shake the soul and let the glory out. When the great oak is straining in the wind, The boughs drink in new beauty and the trunk Sends down a deeper root on the windward side. Only the soul that knows the mighty grief Can know the mighty rapture, Sorrows come To stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.

I work within the framework of a very concerted, purely driven Protestant Christian mindset. I had dark early circumstances. I went inward. I have a sturdy will. I have a big heart. I'm a decent guy. And I have a great gift. It's blunted me to the world in many ways.

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

Desire looks clear from the eyes of a lovely bride: power as strong as the founded world

when you feel like hope is gone, look inside you and be strong and you'll finally see the truth- that hero lies in you.

No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.

Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.

From this day on, I refuse to let anyone bring me to a point where I can't take a horrible situation and spin it into something beneficial. I will never let anyone make me feel anything I don't want to feel again or rob me of the passions that make me who I am.

The more you feel, the stronger you are.

Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a great space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities – not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup.