Quotes About Perseverance

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically.

As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.

He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard, and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

Fall if you will, but rise you must.

James Kelman

Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it.

No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.

Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.

Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.

what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough?

New Orleans would always be New Orleans, he told himself, no matter if it had gone under the waves, no matter if cynical and self-serving politicians had left the people of the lower Ninth Ward to drown. New Orleans was a song and a state of mind and a party that never ended, and those who did not understand that simple fact should have to get passports to enter the city.

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke

It's strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they've always been.

and sometimes throwing your own

James Lee Burke

PEOPLE WHO ARE unknowledgeable about agriculture often refer to farm labor as unskilled. Take bucking bales. Try inserting your fingers inside the twine on ninety pounds of compacted grass after it has been rained on, then flinging it up on the flatbed of a truck and repeating the process every four minutes for eight hours. If you want to up the ante, do it in an electric storm.

In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.

James Lee Burke

I'm tired of sackcloth and

It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.

If you get your ticket ripped in half, you do it in hot blood, and you do not go gently into that good night.

James Lee Burke