Quotes About Perseverance

MAMA Well, little boys' hides ain't as tough as Southside roaches. You better get over there behind the bureau. I seen one marching out of there like Napoleon yesterday.

Good works will be recognized ultimately, but if you work for the recognizion alone, you may be in for a long wait.

I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.

Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.

In so many things I loved I was sadly insufficiently gifted and driven. But writing I could plod along with -- and no one discouraged me. People were much kinder. I headed toward the kindness.

Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

You live if you dance to the voice that ails you.

But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush. Still

Talent. I don't have talent. I have willingness.

It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.

Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.

Life is 10 percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.

You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.

Adversity is another way to measure the greatness of individuals. I never had a crisis that didn't make me stronger.

Don't tell me how rocky the sea is, just bring the darn ship in. - Lou Holtz

He became, in that instant, pure topography: his belly a highland, tapering down to a head-hamlet, with two hard-blinking eye-ponds. Four servants rushed to his aid. He waved them off with a smile. Made

After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

for the bird that cannot soar, God has provided low branches.

He was like one of those saprophytic orchids that can create harmony and wonder even as it grows and blossoms on a pile of shit, in a place of skulls and bones. He let his rifle rust, and even los it once or twice, but he won battles armes with nothing but a mandolin. (195-196)

few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit