Quotes About Persistence

Whatever you don't won't be enough. Try anyway.

I've trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian.

Because, you know, contrary to the song of a great American master, we're generally not born to run. Most of us are born to run a little bit and go back home.

Rarely do your efforts bear fruit right away; the scale of most problems coming across your desk is too big for that, the factors at play too varied.

You don't just luck into things as much as you'd like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it's friendships or opportunities.

You don't just luck into things...You build step by step, whether it's friendships or opportunities.

Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again. It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way.

She understood that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

What keeps you going isn't just some fine destination but the road you're on and the fact you know how to drive.

For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night. . . . I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet. . . . I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind.

the unbearable persistence of hope

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!

The essential ingredient of authorship is authority. You hunt it out in a library, you chase it down the street, or you knit it from the fiber of your own will. From somewhere, you get it. You begin

He would have no inkling of the great slog of effort that tied up people like her in the day-to-day.

It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

rainy day, which this was, still yet and always.

The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.

I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out.