Quotes About Persistence

People say I'm a pain in the rear, but we surrender to people who say we are pains the rear.

life was a stone cutting and grinding...

She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody's eye.

I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to light. But when he did, I didn't even see him at first. The buzzing stopped and there he was. And then the phone rang.

But this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down. A gag, I said. An old, old gag. Who is this Hemingway person at all? A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good. That must take a hell of a long time, the big man said.

So they didn't scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?

Perché vuoi fare la maestra? - Per rompere le balle alle bambine, - rispose Zazie.- Quelle che avranno la mia età fra dieci, tra vent'anni, tra cinquant'anni, fra cento anni, fra mille anni. Aver sempre da rompere le balle a qualcuno.

They're back now. Archer followed

All of life is like this. You may attempt over and over again to accomplish a goal, but if you do so from an intellectual standpoint only, you'll rarely be successful.

Toda tu vida funciona así. Aunque intentes lograr un objetivo una y otra vez, si sólo lo haces desde un punto de vista intelectual, rara vez tendrás éxito. Sin embargo, si tu objetivo te apasiona, el éxito estará prácticamente asegurado.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.

Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them.

A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Nothing is ever so good that it can't stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don't need to or can't go down it. You can. We have.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.