Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There’s a quiet rebuke embedded in Žbanić’s praise: the heroism she’s interested in isn’t cinematic, and it isn’t loud. “Never complaining” can read, at first glance, like the familiar expectation that women swallow pain gracefully. But in her framing, it’s less about saintliness than strategy. Complaint is a luxury in catastrophe; attention has to go somewhere else. The verb choices do the real work here: “create”, “rescue”, “giving”. She describes normal life not as something that passively survives trauma, but as something actively manufactured and defended, like contraband.

Coming from a director whose films circle the Bosnian war and its afterlives, the line sits inside a larger cultural argument about what we choose to memorialize. War stories traditionally gravitate toward speeches, battles, and decisive men. Žbanić shifts the camera to maintenance: improvising meals, steadying children, stitching routines back together in the middle of rupture. “Rescue normal life” is an almost paradoxical phrase, and that’s the point; normalcy becomes the endangered species, the thing that needs extraction and protection.

The subtext is political without sounding like it. “Hope” and “being positive” aren’t motivational slogans here; they’re infrastructure. She’s naming a kind of labor that rarely makes it into official histories because it doesn’t look like power, even though it’s what makes survival legible. If there’s an edge to the admiration, it’s this: resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a collective practice, often carried by women, often unpaid, and too easily taken for granted once the crisis stops being news.