Quotes About Perseverance

The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn't, we'd have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

He was all of them in one black body that night in the ring, and all of them when the shite men took him out back to those two iron rings.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one's attention.

Stubborn breaks when it don't bend

Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention. She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers.

The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel

This isn't going to un-fuck itself.

Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change.

Gnaw on a disappointment long enough and it will lose all flavor.

That's true," Turner said. "That doesn't mean I can't see how it works. Maybe I see things more clearly because of it." He made a face as the soap powder gave him a kick. "The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.

Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.

The loneliness is the worst, because this knowledge is something that cannot be shared, only suffered. Just as well. Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

Or maybe she will keep it a garden. An anchor in the vicious waters of the plantation to prevent her from being carried away. Until she chose to be carried away.

At the end of the day when she propped him up and told him he could do it, he puzzled over these alien things she offered him. Kindness and faith, he didn't know which box to put them in.

It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora

My first fight made me cockeyed," he said, "and my farewell fight set my eyes right again, so trust me when I say this sport will break you down to make you better, and that's a fact.

He cleared his throat, he gestured, and remained a black ghost, store after store, accumulating the standard humiliations, until he climbed the black iron steps to Aronowitz & Sons and the proprietor asked, "Can I help you, sir?" Can I help you as in Can I help you? As opposed to What are you doing here? Ray Carney, in his years, had a handle on the variations.

Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

Colson Whitehead

If you weren't a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren't much of a man.

Her new life required a different sort of strength. She was meticulous in her posture, a walking spear, in the manner of those who'd been made to bend and will bend no more.