Quotes About Perseverance

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.

Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It's in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means 'the long suffering one'.

He had the dog on a lead and he was still managing to be a boy with a dog and the dog was still managing to be a dog with a boy because not even a bomb gets to wipe out everything

Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

I've flown about a bit and picked up a few things and I'll give one of them to you for nothing. You don't run out on the woman you love.

Everything we do is falling. Even walking is a kind of controlled falling. But that's not the same as failing.

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it. Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture. This is one moment . . . know that another . . . Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Cuando cayó la noche, vio la luz del faro del cabo de la Ira; solo hacía una semana que estaba encendida, pero estaba encendida, y supo que si se convertía a sí mismo en la historia de la luz, quizá se salvaría.

I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.

The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart's desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls.

We live as best we may in a world of worms.

I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved.

With faith, all things are possible.

In fact, there are more than two chances - many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen. But I was alive. And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

I have ridden out all the storms," said Shakespeare, "even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn't interested in a little black girl's dreams.

You don't have to get into writing – it's not like a pair of jeans... The only way to write is to write – the rest may or not follow.

I've thought of killing myself so many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.

Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.

Suffer, die, or get better; but whatever you do, live while you are alive.