"People ask, how do you cope, and all I can say is that you do"
About this Quote
That's the subtext doing the heavy lifting. The quote implies that coping is often less about bravery than about absence of alternatives. It needles the modern appetite for narrativizing hardship - for turning grief, illness, or loneliness into content. Bates offers no catharsis, just endurance as a kind of involuntary labor. There's a quiet mercy in that, too: if you're failing to "cope" in a photogenic way, you're still doing it, because continuing at all is the coping.
As an actor, Bates understood how easily emotion becomes a scene, how readily people mistake articulation for resolution. His intent reads like a corrective to the interview circuit's demand for packaged vulnerability. The sentence is almost aggressively small, but that's why it lands. It's anti-quote quote: not motivational, not explanatory, just accurate. In a culture addicted to advice, he gives the oldest truth there is: survival isn't always a choice you make; it's what happens when the day keeps arriving.
Quote Details
| Topic | Resilience |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bates, Alan. (2026, January 16). People ask, how do you cope, and all I can say is that you do. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/people-ask-how-do-you-cope-and-all-i-can-say-is-138850/
Chicago Style
Bates, Alan. "People ask, how do you cope, and all I can say is that you do." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/people-ask-how-do-you-cope-and-all-i-can-say-is-138850/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"People ask, how do you cope, and all I can say is that you do." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/people-ask-how-do-you-cope-and-all-i-can-say-is-138850/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.







