“Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive… it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be.”

Lawrence Summers in: David Warsh (February 11, 1992) "Avoiding Weimar Russia", Boston Globe, p. 37, Section: Business.
1990s

Source: Home

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven

p205
Variant: Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.
Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 11, Ritual

Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Source: Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 89