Quotes About Perseverance

the work you do each day matters. Even if it's work that seems invisible. Even if it's work that doesn't lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.

The truest story is always the widest one. It's the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.

It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there

You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to.

my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away.

You've earned the right to grow. You're going to have to carry the water yourself.

You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you're fucked before you begin.

But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn't calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If I'd done that, I wouldn't have been here, eighty-some days out

on the PCT, broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn't afford to do it.

Adrienne Rich … did not die a woman who denied that her wounds came from the same source as her power. In fact, she spent her life making power from those wounds [but] Marie Curie… didn't have that luxury — she had to deny that in order to be who she was in her time. But we don't. And I think so much of the work I've done … and the work I hope I continue to do, is about writing into those wounds.

The only way to override your limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude is to produce.

she had to be her best self more often than it's reasonable for any human to be. And you know what's so never-endingly beautiful to me? She was. She was imperfect. She made mistakes. But she was her best self more often than it's reasonable for any human to be.

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.

You must do everything you can to get what you want and need, to find "that type of love." It's there for you. I know it's arrogant of me to say so, because what the hell do I know about looking like a monster or a beast? Not a thing. But I do know that we are here, all of us—beasts and monsters and beauties and wallflowers alike—to do the best we can. And every last one of us can do better than give up.

It's what most of us have to give a few times over the course of our lives: to love with a mindfully clear sense of purpose, even when it feels outrageous to do so. Even when you'd rather put on your steel-toed boots and scream. Give it. You won't regret it. It will come out in the reckoning.

When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we've fallen before. I hope you will remember that the next time you fail.

she said things I already knew but needed to hear again. How in darkness, we are waiting. How it is in the times that we must search hardest for the light that we are most profoundly transformed.

We're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

Cheryl Strayed

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can't go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way,

It's that the work you do each day matters. Even if it's work that seems invisible. Even if it's work that doesn't lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.

It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.

You're up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.