Quotes About Perseverance

These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.

because dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms...

Does he bite?" the driver asked. "He even bites me," I said. He picked a fight with whatever the world brought him, and that day it happened to be a Lincoln. I don't think he would have hurt the driver, but he sure would have messed up a nice suit. The next week he did it again, and the next.

The scale spun to the truth of it. The two women, together, had picked more than six hundred pounds of cotton--at two dollars per one hundred pounds, they made six dollars each, and a little change. They had picked three times their weight.

But I knew, as I staggered down that hill with that awful dog, what the unreliable men in my family have always known: that this ol' life can be a bleak, sorry, boring slog, if you take the time, at every turn, to think it through. { Three } Tough Guys The dog lay in the garage as I cleaned off the mud and old blood with a rag.

Even though his pocket's were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was poor as poor got outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like a suit of mail (...) I think it's much more civilized to knock someone on their ass, than the cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York.

Even though his pockets were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was as poor as poor could get outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like mail. (...) I think it is much more civilized to knock someone on his ass than cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking.

They, especially, taught me that you can't go through life not liking people because they didn't have to work as hard or come as far as you did.

Every now and then you know it's kinda hard to tell... but I'm still alive and well!

Many are called to do great things, but they do not fulfill those callings because they do not give themselves to the little things.

You must do all that you do here with joy. The joy of The Lord is your strength, and you can only make it through this valley by His strength.

Life will always throw you curves, just keep fouling them off... the right pitch will come, but when it does, be prepared to run the bases.

If you talked about writing books, you'd never do it.

Tree limbs scraped at her face and arms, snagged and pulled at her jeans and backpack. Thick wild growth, practically impossible to walk through. But Paige kept moving, banging her walking stick against the trees and brush, feeling herself moving in a downward slope.

He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful, and this was justified because many awful things had happened to him.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed, included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses.

When the stakes are the biggest is when the challenges to focus can be the most difficult and the most costly.

Muhammad Ali said, "Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.

performance is your greatest ally in dealing with adversity, and focus is your greatest weapon in achieving that performance.

Discouragement often comes from focusing on the wrong things. It also derives from a lack of patience, which is a virtue we are losing in our society.