Quotes About Perseverance

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

The world is not interested in the storms you encountered, but did you bring the ship in?

It cannot rain all the time...

I pray God I may never be brought to the melancholy trial but, if ever I should, it will then be known how far I can reduce to practice principles which I know to be founded in truth.

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon.

No one emerges from a troubled childhood without the battle scars to prove it. It is amazing that we fare as well as we do.

Ask any good teacher or any business executive who's been in the trenches. They will tell you that attitude trumps ability every time.

I don't damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much.

You...are...a...fridge...with wings,' Fang ground out, punching an Eraser hard with every word. 'We're...freaking...ballet...dancers.

You...are...a...fridge...with wings,' Fang ground out, punching an Eraser hard with every word. 'We're...freaking...ballet...dancers.

Q: You'er presented with a smooth-faced, eight-foot-high wooden wall. Your objective? Get over it. To, like, save comrades or something. How to accomplish this? A: Take a running start, brace one foot against the wall, throw one hand to the top, try to hang on long enough for a comrade to either grab your hand at the top or for another comrade to push your butt up from below. It takes team work! BKA (bird kid answer): Or you could just, like, fly over it.

Rashers, me heart, if it was raining soup, you'd have nothing but a fork.

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair. —Chinese proverb

Here's the thing about digging in January: it's a lousy idea. The ground was as hard as a surprise math quiz. But not quite as much fun.

But all I had to show for the week was a blank sheet of paper. Maybe I could tell Ms. Gleason I had come up with a new kind of poem--the invisible kind.

James R. Chiles

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp. -James Ramsey Ullman

Hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind banging and banging itself to pieces.

And as for those who might have been following me, odds are I lost them long, long ago. Nothing to do but keep on driving as clearly as if I hadn't, flashing my change of lane and exit, in case there's anyone who needs to know.

As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going