Quotes About Perseverance

Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist past it are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? Or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?

Pain is a part of who we are. You can't destroy it, and you can't hide from it.

On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

You wouldn't call yourself a runner if you quit every race your ran halfway through.

Writers are made -- forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities -- over the course of many, many moons.

Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.

We must remember that our fight continues. Our rebellion is over. But the war…the war is just beginning. —ADMIRAL ACKBAR

Failure has to be illuminating: an instruction manual written in scar tissue.

Stop abandoning your children. You wouldn't call yourself a runner if you quit every race halfway through. Finishing is a good start. Stop looking for the escape hatch; pretend your work in progress just doesn't have one. 23.

We'll find a way forward. On this. I know we've hit a wall. It's not Trypanosoma, it's not flu, it's not anything. I trust this team. We'll find a breakthrough very soon, Doctor Ray." They had no idea how true that was.

Good story thrives on protagonists in pain.

Put differently, harden the fuck up, soldier. (And beard the fuck on, while we're at it.)

God, he knew, helped those who helped themselves. But wasn't God also there to catch you if you fell?

Shut up and write.

He's the meat in the meat locker. The wrecking ball at the end of a crane's chain. The seawall that stands between the ocean and the shore. Big. Bald. Beaten down.

He knows how war goes. It's not many wars, but just one, drawn out again and again, cut up into slices so it seems more manageable.

You're not tasked with desalinating an ocean or training a komodo dragon to cure ebola. I'm saying, sludge yourself into the ass receptacle and peck keyboard keys like a hungry chicken until it makes words.

You're not tasked with desalinating an ocean or training a komodo dragon to cure ebola. I'm saying, sludge yourself into the ass receptacle and peck keyboard keys like a hungry chicken until it makes words. Or pick up one of the tools used by our distant ancestors -- it is a tube filled with the liquid black souls of all the animals we've made extinct -- and use this pen as a scribe would to etch scribbly heretical word-shapes onto dead tree pulp.

She didn't believe that. Didn't agree with it. But intrusive thoughts were trespassers. You didn't invite them in. But they broke in, anyway, whether they were true or false.

It's all elbows, Paul. Death and elbows.

You did what you could and held faith that it would get better. Sometimes it did. A lot of times, it didn't.

the world's gone to hell, and we're driving through Satan's lower intestine

Freedom will bite back more fiercely when suspended than when she remains undisturbed.

No power is strong enough to be lasting if it labours under the weight of fear.