Quotes About Perseverance

Close your eyes and listen, such people advised, then walk twenty paces farther than you thought necessary. Just when you're certain you've lost your way completely, you'll be there. Open your eyes.

but when there was nothing left to try it could not hurt to believe in something, however preposterous it might seem.

In every fairy tale the girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

It's amazing what you can block out when you really try. Although some things stay with you no matter what they affect everything that you do.

some things you carry around inside you as though they were part of your blood and bones, and when that happens, there's nothing you can do to forget.

Being a physician is like working on a machine that keeps breaking down, time after time.

The past stays with a man, sticking to his heels like glue, invisible and heartbreaking and unavoidable, threaded to the future, just as surely as day is sewn to night.

The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can't even see it, shifting in the dark.

Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can't even see. It's there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky.

That was when my father went to the docks, that patient, good man I had so little respect for, though we were of the same flesh and blood and he had saved my life more than a dozen times when we traveled over continents, finding us bread and shelter. He was a mouse who feared the forest, yet he had managed to take us into France and on to Le Havre, where he worked shoveling coal in a mill until we could afford steerage on a boat to New York, the only dream we ever shared.

Without courage, you will never find the answer

Should is what you don't want to do, but do anyway. That isn't me.

In books, no one helped a girl who didn't help herself and every fairy tale ended with the same lessons. Trick your energy, do what you must, believe in enchantments, save yourself.

I cure him every time. That is the only way to treat this disease. Some things return no matter what, and we must deal with it when it does.

Never be without thread," she told the girl. "What is broken can also be mended. Remember that in your dark days, as I have.

When a draft looks terrible, I don't try to convince myself that it's actually good or even that someday it will be, only that it's my job to work on it whether it's good or not.

Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father's surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan's ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through.

Michael looked through the rolled-up window, across the long and empty parking lot to the dark green pines that seemed to be raising their arms to the wind, shaking spindly fists. His

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering. . .

Like the youthful Nietzsche, he was assailed by all kinds of illnesses, and he was virtually unable to concentrate. He spent weeks at a time in the infirmary, and finally ended up among the pupils with the poorest grades.

It's just life. You can't beat life.

She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: "Well, lucky I can do anything at all.