Quotes About Perseverance

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to...You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.

It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.

Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small.

We're all tougher than we think we are. We're fixed so that almost anything heals.

If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.

Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe until she falls.

When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails.

Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong.

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game.