Quotes About Persistence

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities -- their brute persistence.

For a full week after trying to reach the editor of The Atlantic, I occupied myself with other things. On October 31 I made some cheerful notes about Tracy Chapman's singing and about Bizet's Carmen. On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn't enough.

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are suppose to go.

The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done.

So the whole conversation is going right off course. It's like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I'm thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.

Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.

There were no more hurdles. Now all they had to do was walk, and see how far they could get.

Because it is so hard to keep the world going. There is always the temptation to abandon the effort altogether. For there is always the sowing and the harvesting, the building and the repairing, the falling down and the rising up again. Every day, everything has to be done all over again. In our world, it is always Monday morning.

Practice makes perfect, But nothings perfect so why bother practicing?

The ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing.

You will start a band. You will start a magazine. You will start a family. You will finish nothing.

In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.

Better to try and fail than not to try at all

I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.

It's barely alive, but it is alive. More brown than green. There are parts that have withered. But still it lives, leaning always to the left. Even when I rotate it so that what faced the sun no longer faces the sun, it stubbornly leans to the left, choosing against physical need in favor of an act of creativity. I poured the rest of my water into its pot. What does it mean, anyway, to flourish?

How little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

it is necessary for you to study; since, then, you have no longer the excuse of illness, take pains to study letters and music, for you see what honour is done to me for the little skill I have. Therefore, my son, if you wish to please me, and to bring success and honour to yourself, do right and study, because others will help you if you help yourself.

Life is a series of hits and misses and tests that never end, but the reward is when you win Heaven just because you gave it your best try.

If something is worth doing - it's worth overdoing.

I don't think there is a thrill that can go though the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success...such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, "Never more!