Quotes About Persistence

As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.

I wonder what ants do on rainy days?

Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.

Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow, Korogi says. But that's one thing I'll never be able to outrun. Nobody can shake off their own shadow.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.

The heart apparently doesn't stop that easily.

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

If there's something I can't do but want to, I won't relax until I'm able to do it.

At least he never walked.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial. You're exactly right. Absolutely. Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to be concrete. That is also something I had to learn on my own.

If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back.

But maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.

I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. And killing time is one of my specialities.

Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.