Quotes About Perseverance

For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness.

With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted

When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes. In his seventies, he discovered skateboarding. At eighty-five, he returned to Kwajalein on a project, ultimately unsuccessful

alive.3 Johnny found myriad avenues of

When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes.

Thorbjørn Christiansen

They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he'd dedicate his life to him. The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.

Louie never saw a Chong diner finish his meal.

actress Esther Williams on the wall. The note that Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor. Among Louie's things, Krey found photographs that Louie had taken inside his plane. In some of them, Louie

Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak

Who hit you in the butt with a saddle and told you you could ride?" a starter hissed before a race. "The same S.O.B. that hit you in the butt and told you you could start!" he shot back. Pollard had found the one place on earth that could hold his interest. He was broke, hungry, and, according to his sister Edie, "happy as heck.

You don't throw a whole life away just because it's banged up a little bit.

Louie grabbed the flare gun, loaded it, and fired. The flare shot straight at the bomber; for a moment, the men thought that it would hit the plane. But the flare missed, passing alongside the plane, making a fountain of red that looked huge from the raft. Louie reloaded and fired again. The plane turned sharply right. Louie fired two more flares, past the tail.

If Red breaks that leg again," Howard said soberly, "it will cripple him for life." Alexander told him that maybe it was better to break a man's leg than his heart.

To expand his lung capacity, he ran to the public pool at Redondo Beach, dove to the bottom, grabbed the drain plug, and just floated there, hanging on a little longer each time. Eventually, he could stay underwater for three minutes and forty-five seconds. People kept jumping in to save him.

From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.

Laura Hillenbrand

With heads thrown back, legs pumping out of sync, Louie and Lash drove for the tape. With just a few yards remaining, Lash began inching up, drawing even. The two runners, legs rubbery with exhaustion, flung themselves past the judges in a finish so close, Louie later said, "you couldn't put a hair between us.

On July 13, Louise felt a wave of urgency. She penned a letter to Major General Willis Hale, commander of the Seventh Air Force. In it, she begged Hale not to give up searching; Louie, she wrote, was alive. Unbeknownst to Louise, on that same day, Louie was captured.

Seabiscuit took to stomping and bellowing for food day and night. His moans rang off the barn walls and worked on everyone's nerves, but no one gave in. "The whole ranch became centered on the job," Howard said. "Even the pigs quit grunting at him and the chickens kept out of his way.

Louie killed time by sleeping on Mitchell's navigator table and taking flying lessons from Phil. On some flights, he sprawled behind the cockpit, reading Ellery Queen novels and taxing the nerves of Douglas, who eventually got so annoyed at having to step over Louie's long legs that he attacked him with a fire extinguisher.

What the Zamperinis were experiencing wasn't denial, and it wasn't hope. It was belief.

A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory

A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.