Quotes About Perseverance

Escape into self-destruction by all means; but not until your duty is done.

Elephants gave you less bother, any day.

Then I tell you,' Sybilla said, 'that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live.

Where there had been peace, now there was endurance. "He will awake," said Nostradamus. "You took a great risk, but he will awake, if that is what you want for him.

It was hard to say therefore why he did not go below, and rally his brother, and encourage him to let the past fade, and look forward to what lay before him. Unless, in his heart of hearts he recognized as Lymond did that what lay around him were shut gates; and what lay before him was nothing.

All these were barred to him because of the vow he had made to Sybilla. Because of it, he could not resign himself to what, easy or difficult, was coming; but instead had to turn again to his lessons: the long, bitter schooling thrust at him, for no purpose, throughout every twist of his lifespan.

He knew what would happen. He has laid wagers with himself, I imagine, for days: how many hours, how many miles towards safety before he has to drop out.

Because you have done all that skill could devise to present a detached case, and failed. Because you are asking for help, and you hate asking for help. [...] This may be,' said Richard with unexpected wry humour, 'a crusade conducted by the Culter family solo in a band of dissentients, but I am with you.

It cost something: it cost almost more than she could manage to fight, and to keep on fighting, by this time.

Level-headed and constructive to the end,' Philippa said, 'in confronting all your personal problems. And now? A trifle of hemlock?

You must, of course, do as you please,' she had remarked. 'But I really think, through all these years, that Mr Crawford has learned to take care of himself. I am sure his unique sense of domestic responsibility will impel him, unswerving, to trace us wherever we go.' Which was precisely the kind of bitchy remark, thought Jerott furiously, that Lymond himself would have made.

He had survived that. He would survive this.

How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?

Jerott stared up through his headache. 'I can manage,' he said. 'Yes. I think you'll manage better tied to your horse,' said Lymond.

He had ridden through the night, without rest and without sleep, for this. It ought, surely, to give someone a moment of wry amusement. He understood—but then he had always understood—how Richard had felt at Philorth.

Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.

His chest heaved, and he coughed. You have coughed before, his mother said. It is a sign of weakness. Control it.

Because, I think, of something you said. One should be able to face anything. I have learned to play chess again. I have learned to listen to music, and to play it. I have learned to buy self-indulgence and enjoy it. I have learned to take a line of logic and follow it through, whatever the consequences.

But I am no godly man. I'm only a commander of some experience, who knows how to ask a tired army to throw its heart into a citadel and follow it. Forgive me.

I have given you nothing. I have shown you what was there in you already, and you have been man enough to destroy what is weak and to foster what is strong until it is unassailable.

What he wanted was very near. It was typical of the monstrous, egregious, laughable irony which dominated his life that with every dragging lift of his arms, he should be saying over and over, 'Not yet.'

I don't mind being labelled devilish but I do mind being regarded as unlucky. The only way to answer that is by a string of successes.

If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

She drew herself up to her full height—it was a little difficult on a donkey—and said primly, "I have always found that in painful situations it is a sensible idea to take each hour as it comes and not to anticipate beyond. But oh how I wish I could have a bath!