Quotes About Perseverance

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

When you pursue the impossible, you will achieve incredible things.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float.

Oh, all right, I say, I'll save myself.

As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.

Everyone in me is a bird. I am beating my wings. They wanted to cut you out but they will not. They said you were immeasurably empty bu you are not. They said you were sick unto dying but they were wrong. You are winging like a school girl. You are not torn.

I am so tired of that old suffering.

I am not seeing anyone or writing anyone—I'm on my 8th draft of this play and how many more—God knows.

She's the one I carried my bones to and built a house that was just a cot and built a life that was over an hour and built a castle where no one lives and built, in the end, a song to go with the ceremony.

She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy, has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast, sat by the potter's wheel at midday, set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

For those learning English as a second language, there is little to do but roll the eyes, tear at the hair, and grimly memorize each one.

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.

I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

Sometimes superheroes are born, sometimes they are made. Sometimes they make themselves. Sometimes all it takes is will.

Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren't even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong.

She didn't know the answer. But there had to be a way. There was always a way.

What are you supposed to do when something like that happens? Do you hold on or let go?

This is what it is to live in the world. You have to give yourself over to the cold, at least a little bit.

Oscar grabbed on to the words and held them.

Sometimes the monsters come harder when you dare stomp. Sometimes you need to bring the whole house down.

Raised to be God-fearing, if not religious, both Violet and Faye came to think of all this - their lives as silent, fettered wives and mothers - as the trade-off for marrying well

KNOWING when to quit may be my greatest victory.