• In order to learn and to experience meaningful change, we must fall apart.
• During periods of chaos, we are at varying degrees of risk, as we cannot determine in advance what direction our future will take.
• By making us more knowledgeable and adaptive, each period of disruption is necessary to  prepare us to meet the stresses and opportunities that lie ahead.
• Failure to pass successfully through any stress cycle can leave us crippled, without the strengths we will need when other bifurcation points appear.

p.21 healthy, resilient people can ordinarily keep the intensity of the disruption within reasonable limits and continue to meet whatever challenges face them.

p110-111 The key to the resilient personality is, above all, flexibility: to be able to call on those particular strengths that are needed to meet particular challenges, to be logical and highly organized when logic and organization are called for, and to be wildly illogical and even let things pass by undone in the interests of discovering unpredictable possibilities.

p.124-125 The visual systems are, after all, a basic method of acquiring information from our environment. The greater the importance of information gathering, the more an impairment in perceptual function will interfere with a smooth, effective performance.

p.132 In school, it was her skill in being able to distinguish between information that was important and that which was not that enabled her to obtain good grades.

p.133 the key to the regulation of self-esteem is resilience, how fast and how effectively we can restructure ourselves after such stress.

p.146 Creativity is an essential part of resilience for two obvious reasons. First, at bifurcation points, things are a shambles and the outcome is quite unclear. Second, when the pieces are reassembled, we, or our lives, or both, will assume new and unfamiliar homeostases... the creative act does not create something out of nothing. It rearranges, combines, and synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, and frames of reference... The creative act clearly adheres to the law of disruption and reintegration, reflecting, and perhaps an inherent part of, something innate in the biological structure of human beings or even all nature.

p.147 In its broadest sense, creativity can be defined as a response to a situation that calls for a novel but adaptive solution, one that serves to accomplish a goal.

p.151 Being able to think creatively and approach problems in an imaginative way is an inherent part of resilience.

p.152 the more we master creative problem-solving skills the more we will be able to respond to stressful situations resiliently... our efforts to employ creative tactics... can become a basic part of our spontaneous response to challenge.

p.152-154 Creative problem solving takes place in five stages... 1. The first stage is fact finding. Here, one reexamines the situation to gain as much information about it as possible... 2. The second is problem finding, in which one redefines issues, trying to see them in a new light... 3. The next stage is idea finding, wherein one generates options as stimulated by the problem as it is now freshly viewed... 4. The fourth stage is solution finding, in which one exerts judgment to evaluate the meaning and both the positive and the negative consequences of the ideas that have been produced... 5. The final stage is acceptance finding, wherein one develops the best ideas as fully as possible and proceeds to test them in the real world.