Quotes About Persistence

Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

I couldn't unpeach the peaches.

You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?

No one ever said it would be easy

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do.

Looking for a thousand years is worth it, if in the end you find what you need.

Being an author sucks, doesn't it? It's like telling a joke and nobody laughs for two years.

That was the trick - to keep punching, no matter what.

Never happens. I've spilled more times than a glass of milk on a roller coaster.

Sometimes wanting isn't enough, Alek. You know that.

Fulfilling what you start is why you start something.

Bound for Glory

And they never have to win; they just have to keep not losing.

Wheedling the borrowed wheels a second time had required an oath nearly signed in blood and a threat of death followed by imprisonment.

Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can't deal with the stress of the moment.

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know.

The challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.

The Cul-de-Sac ( French for dead end ) ... is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt

Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can't see it

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you're going to get there one way or another...so they follow.