Quotes About Persistence

He was one man screaming at 10,000 people screaming at him. He berated and scolded and called his attackers hypocrites at first, all this made them even more incensed. But he didn't budge. He was a tireless defender of himself.

Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.

You know what they say: If at first you don't succeed, f**k it.

You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might.

That's what writers do, Conroy, we wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That's how art works. It's never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It's the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We've got to be patient enough to wait for them.

If ever I'm disheartened by failures such as these, I simply reflect on my humble beginnings and marvel at the enormous distance I have travelled since then.

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it.

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship.

Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it.

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you've learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

For how long could we fail until we surrendered?

Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.

Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.

It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go off.

Love me, because love does not exist, and I tried everything.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.