Quotes About Perseverance

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan? Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden's veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm.

Knowing well that my life must be passed in fatigue and and trouble, I have been endeavouring to wean myself from you: for to myself alone what can be much of a misery? As far as they regard myself I can despise all events: but I cannot cease to love you.

John Gibson Lockhart, writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes

I left poor Scylla in a niche and fled. My fever'd parchings up, my scathing dread Met palsy half way: soon these limbs became 640 Gaunt, wither'd, sapless, feeble, cramp'd, and lame.

You see how I go on—like so many strokes of a hammer. I cannot help it—I am impell'd, driven to it.

Impossible is for the unwilling

The stars look very cold about the sky, and I have many miles on foot to fare.

When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life. Ignatius was about to say this to himself; then he remembered that he went to the movies almost every night, no matter which way Fortuna was spinning.

Mothers got a hard road to travel, believe me.

In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six paragraphs monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some of the tablets, and he realized that several were filled principally with doodling. However, Ignatius thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

She appears to have been knocked a bit in her life already. Up rather than down. If she ever nears me, however, the direction will be reversed.

John Kennedy Toole

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

producing Mr. Reilly in the abundant flesh.

John Kennedy Toole

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

Times change, and wars change. But men don't change, do they?

Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter of snow and crutches with Phineas, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

There isn't much Rainer is proud about any more. In coming to America, he's had to eat a tableful of humble pie, and he's learned it goes down best with a smile.

Whatever gets you through the night

I was the walrus, but now I am John...and so my friends, you'll just have to carry on. The dream is over.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

When you do something noble and beautiful and no one notices, don't be sad. Sunrise is a beautiful spectacle but without a doubt the greater part of the audience is still asleep.