Quotes About Persistence

Writing is hard for every last one of us… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

When the path reveals itself, follow it.

a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Every last one of us can do better than give up.

And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I'd ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and water and to be able to put my backpack down. I kept carrying my backpack anyway. Up and down and around the dry mountains

Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do.

And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard.

But I had walked here, and I wasn't ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet.

quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.

How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles over rugged mountains and waterless deserts if I couldn't even budge it an inch in an air-conditioned motel room? The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack. It hadn't occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to.

me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I'd ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was,

When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, "Samurai Song" Never never never give up.

I'd have to eat that

there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it. And then there was the real live truly doing it. The staying and doing it, in spite of everything.

Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you've got until you're not playing anymore. That's what Cary Grant did. The lonely boy who lost his mom in the fog of his father's deceit found himself in the magic of wanting to be. His name was Archibald Leach.

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again.

My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose.