Quotes About Perseverance

La vera sfida è vivere.

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.

How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles over rugged mountains and waterless deserts if I couldn't even budge it an inch in an air-conditioned motel room? The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack. It hadn't occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to.

me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I'd ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was,

It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I'd begun my hike, I hadn't shed a single tear.

I'd have to eat that

God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch.

That you're so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you're here to do. And when people are here to do that, they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart. So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker. Yours,

That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem.

What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What

them. I looked at the place I'd come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was too far from either, so I forced my way forward.

there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it. And then there was the real live truly doing it. The staying and doing it, in spite of everything.

Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.

I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still

I'd stopped being grandiose. I'd lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I'd-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book.

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.O I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave.

As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the hardest thing I'd ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

Oregón! —exclamó, y casi me dejé arrastrar por el júbilo de su voz, casi me llevó a creer que esos 320 kilómetros eran coser y cantar, pero de sobra sabía que no era así. Para mí, todas y cada una de las semanas en el sendero habían sido un suplicio. —Oregón —admití,

I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea.

I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail this darkly.

My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.

If your Nerve, deny you – Go above your Nerve – EMILY DICKINSON

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.