Quotes About Perseverance

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.

If I could start my life all over again, I would be a professional football player, and you damn well better believe I would be a Pittsburgh Steeler.

He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

No matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference.

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.

The school of life offers some difficult courses, but it is in the difficult class that one learns the most.

Don't just live a life; build one.

Never skip a step. Skip a step, you'll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.

But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?

Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort

Apparently we'd been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive.

Life is still hard, but it is fair, and there is more joy in it that doesn't feast on heartache.

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before;

Perhaps there is no shame in this, perhaps I can bear this, fight this. To give in but not give up. And projected back out behind him, toward the sea, Saul unable to say the name, just three simple words that seemed so inadequate, and yet they were all he had left to use.

The way back was harder, and no getting around that-no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left it give.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's defiance in that, too.

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.

Writing fiction is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces turned upside down.

Truth crushed to the earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.

Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, / He who travels fastest who travels alone...

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

It's a tough life, she'd said. "It's the little things that get us through the day.

Yield and you need not break. Bent, you can straighten. Emptied, you can hold. Torn, you can mend.