Quotes About Perseverance

It wasn't that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit.

The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.

Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain; If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!

I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper

I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

Well, well. What can't be cured must be endured. This is our last hope gone. We shall be reduced to ringing minors.

If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller—all other interests, your own and other people's.

I've broken the ice,' she said aloud, 'and the water wasn't so cold after all. I shall go back, from time to time. I shall go back.

Mr. Copley, feeling as though his head were filled with hard knobs of spinning granite that crashed with sickening thuds against his brainpan, walked stiffly away to his own quarters. As

But I don't give up; I forget why not.

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Daily dawns another day; I must up, to make my way. Though I dress and drink and eat, Move my fingers and my feet, Learn a little, here and there, Weep and laugh and sweat and swear, Hear a song, or watch a stage, Leave some words upon a page, Claim a foe, or hail a friend- Bed awaits me at the end.

They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.

Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.

If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don't, and what if I do?

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

I don't ask You to make it easy for me—You can't do that, for all that You could make a world.

When you're wondering whether you're obligated to finish a book, keep these wise words in mind: It is not a novel to be thrown aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force.

Mrs. Martindale worked, and worked hard. She worked doubly hard, for she was unskilled at what she did, and she disliked the doing of it.

Farthest am I from perfection's heights, Faulty am I as I well could be, Still I insist on my share of rights.

A good detective not only has to be intelligent, persevering and prepared to do enless boring routine work, he also needs one other quality: Intuition. I see it rather as the ability to make connections which are there but are not immediately apparent. Subterranean connections.

Life is not in the habit of producing just what we want when we want it. For every exciting, challenging task there are usually a hundred dull ones to be tackled. Detective Thanet- Puppet for a Corpse