Quotes About Perseverance

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

Harriet Johnson was a slight hummingbird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose.

or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

That burden of carrying an apartment on your back; you stagger sometimes but you take the weight, what else can you do?

He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying.

I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep 'write what you know'—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world's indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.

We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it's the only thing we eat all day.

it was time to get out of what Coach called small-stack mentality. I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down.

He upheld the misspelling in his thoughts, in keeping with his loyalty to his mistakes.

Weary and a little desperate, but also high-hearted. He turned off the lights.

Mark Spitz backed away from the fucking corn.

In this world, however, his reward was that void attending most human endeavor, with which all are well acquainted. His accomplishments, such as they were, gathered on the heap of the unsung.

How had he suffered the old arrangement for that long? Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.

Sometimes he tried to get a basketball game together, two-on-two, but after a while we just started playing three against him, and he still won, leaving us a sorry sight at the side of the court, bent over and dizzy, palms on our knees and reaching for imaginary asthma inhalers. Imaginary asthma inhalers created a placebo effect, which was better than nothing.

Brother Mingo made some good points, Lander said. We can't save everyone. But that doesn't mean we can't try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing's going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, 'This is not enough.' But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don't.

most people who've been around awhile know [love's] just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lost it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.

Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

There was something of the beautiful failure about her.

There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.