Quotes About Perseverance

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there. It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve.

Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine.

the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.

There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

That place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.

It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Don't worry about it too much. You're green, but you're tough. And tough is what matters the most out here. Not just anyone could do what you're doing.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

We don't reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.

The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there's arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.

I knew that if I allowed fear to over take me, my journey was doomed.

Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don't have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.

Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight.

You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body to the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn't a day on the trail when that monotony didn't ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure.