Quotes About Persistence

I wasn't worried, though. I just needed a break and I wasn't going to give up.

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

Se você bater no muro, não pare.

the signs that mock me as I go.

The only time you ever run out of chances is when you stop taking them.

Do either one of you know how to turn this thing on?" I join him and punch a couple buttons on the [printer's] front panel, but nothing happens. "We are pitiful," he says. Elena walks past us, reaches a hand behind the copier, and pushes a switch. The machine begins to hum and glow. "Speak for yourself.

RESIGN! It's the way to show you mean business. If people constantly reject your ideas/ what you have to offer, resign. You can't keep fighting and losing that makes you a problem. If you are good, and right for the job, resignation will not be accepted. You'll be re-signed in your own term. If they accept your resignation, you were in the wrong job, and it's better for you to move on. It takes courage, but it is the right move.

Failure was a major contributor to its success.

When it can't be done, do it. If you don't do it, it doesn't exist.

She knows there's no success like failure And that failure's no success at all.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Not to me," I said. Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby- Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?

There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don't. And if you do, you can't be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don't, you never will again.

and if he could survive the experience without completely losing heart, then perhaps there was some hope for him after all. By sticking with the cab, he wasn't trying to make the best of a bad situation. He was looking for a way to make things happen, and until he understood what those things were, he wouldn't have the right to release himself from his bondage.

Lo que realmente me asombra no es que todo esté derrumbado, sino la gran cantidad de cosas que todavía siguen en pie.

I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.

Sólo de la constancia nacen las grandes cosas

La única constante en este mundo es la mierda, muchacho.

The demands of words are too great for that; one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.

And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it — which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever.

L'unica costante a questo mondo è la merda, ragazzo mio. Ci stiamo in piedi a mollo ogni giorno, ma a volte, quando arriva alle ginocchia o anche più su, devi solo tirarti fuori e andare avanti.

one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.

because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply.