Quotes About Persistence

The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.

One never gets anything worth having by post.

Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.

The soul must brave itself to endure.

We stumble up—we stumble on.

If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her.

But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

Yes, but I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind by stopping, by looking; I will walk.

Later . . ." her sentence bubbled away drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.

que como aficionados se nos ha negado toda instrucción en ese arte; que lo que sabemos lo hemos aprendido nosotros mismos; y que imprimimos en los ratos libres de una vida que dedicamos a otras cosas.

Arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze..." I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another cafe, sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mocking and mysterious persistence.

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child's finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.

I could see the corridor window, where the wires-six thin black wires-were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skyward, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again.

Finally it gave up- as some day life will give up- bothering me.

And what I say is not it, not quite it, and I am getting mixed up, getting nowhere, talking nonsense, and the more I move about and search in the water where I grope on the sandy bottom for a glimmer I have glimpsed, the muddier the water grows, and the less likely it becomes that I shall grasp it.

there's no unemployment in the workplace of God. And no discrimination of any kind. You say yes to Him, He'll use you. You say no, and He'll find somebody else to do it—after giving you a jillion chances to say yes. He's persistent. And patient.

Dad simply would not settle for second best. He always insisted on several basic rules of personal behavior. Anything worthwhile costs an effort, or If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well, or Opportunities only come to those prepared to grasp them, or Do the thing you fear and so overcome.