Quotes About Perseverance

I was working on a book about health and wellness, and nobody was interested in that from me. Thankfully, my cowriters reached out and sold me on the idea of doing an autobiography.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

I have an American trainer - a bubbly Californian. I tell her, 'Welsh women don't run. We're congenitally incapable.' But she's got me up to five kilometers.

Even though my father was a producer, I had to struggle a lot in the industry. There are many days when I wept.

Anyone is free to judge me, but they weren't there in my tough times.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

Everyone who achieves success in a great venture, solves each problem as they came to it. They helped themselves. And they were helped through powers known and unknown to them at the time they set out on their voyage. They keep going regardless of the obstacles they met.

Anytime you see Beyonce, Jay Z, Kanye West. Anytime a young black person's doing good, that's motivation for everybody else. Anytime, anytime, it's motivation. Use that fuel to push you forward. That's what I did.

Like, I always knew I wanted a Kanye West feature and a Jay-Z feature. I knew that starting in the game when it wasn't even realistic to happen. I already knew who I wanted to do records with.

We didn't think we were a fourth-place team. For us to beat the first-place team in the West and the first-place team in the East shows the dedication and determination that we had.

In 2004, I was on the West End stage in The Woman In White, and for every show I had to climb into a fat suit to play the obese Count Fosco. It was hard work, and unbearably hot, but I sailed through because I'd always kept myself fit.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

My mom is a woman who grew up in a small farming village in the West Bank called Beit Ur El Foka. She only went to school up to 8th grade and then dropped out to go work in a tailor shop that made dresses and different embroidered designs to make money for her family.

A lot of people - they might think I fell off, but they don't know I'm eating. I'm on the West coast, eating. It's just they don't hear about me because they don't see me on the TV. But I'm still around.

I was always real deep into music. From everything, all around the board - from East Coast, West Coast, down South, everywhere. I just been a fan of music and I know I always wanted to do it myself and I wanted to do it my way. So, I told myself if I ever start doing music, I'ma do it my way. That's what made me start my own label.

You can always say that it was scarce dollars when Lewis and Clark wanted to go to the West Coast and explore the West. And people complained about it, I understand, from a reading of the history books.

I went to several different grade schools all over the West Coast. I got polio when I was 8 and spent eight months in the hospital and a rehab clinic in Seattle.

When people left on the Oregon Trail from St. Louis, they knew that only a fraction of them would make it to the West Coast. But they went anyway.

I've led a life of such structured discipline and always had a goal in mind of knowing what I was doing, from West Point to the Air Force combat, MIT, looking for new things to study and get involved in. And then I got into the space program, and how disciplined can you get?

My mother cried when I told her I really didn't want to go to West Point. So I went.

In the States, it takes you a lifetime just to get from Chicago's South Side to the West Side.

I trained for the marathon. I run along the East River, and I used to run all the way down Manhattan, up the West Side and back home.

When I was running for speaker, people would go out of their way to point out why I wasn't going to win: 'You're a woman, you're too liberal, you're gay, you're from the West Side of Manhattan,' which in that context was an insult.