Quotes About Perseverance

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. "Pa?

A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.

He thinks: He could give up. He could admit defeat. But he will not admit defeat. He is still alive.

Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.

I have no talent, no gift. I have the panting ardor of a workhorse. Yet in time even a workhorse wears out.

He said no break is permanent. Like a bone that heals crooked, still it will heal.

he'd come to earth. Hard.

happened to you! what happened

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains. A

What a barbaric way to rise into the air, hauling your own carcass up inches at a time.

No has fracasado, aunque no hayas estado a la altura de la exaltada idea que tienes de ti misma.

There is a carpet, or a strip of something, that I am walking on...and it is being rolled up behind me. So that there is only the strip I am walking on, with nothing in front or behind me. Sometimes, I am so very tired - but there is no place to rest.

En el Exilio te agarras a lo que tienes, a lo que no te han quitado (todavía).

I stand before you, naked as clear water. To be with you, in blood and soul into your fire storm. Even at your darkest when your heart is a Black Forest, I stand with commitment .

Fucking macramé knots were maybe harder than they looked.

Joyce Carol Oates

Yet within seconds she summoned her steely will, this will that so impressed Dirk Burnaby, for he'd never encountered anything like it in his life, establishing where she was, and why. The bad dream was outside her, in the world. She must conquer it there or nowhere.

Labor was the right word for it. You surely do labor. Like pushing a wagon loaded with cement blocks uphill, three wheels stuck. Grunting, sweating, straining like a sow to give birth as it's called.

She didn't return to school until the first Monday in March. By that time she'd thought, thought long and hard, much of the time in solitude in her room, and healed herself. Of course, she kept up with her school assignments; she was diligent, even obsessive about that.