Quotes About Perseverance

What's this "rough life of a novelist" bullshit? You sound like an idiot. You're a writer. At least give yourself better lines.

This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved. At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.

Malcolm Folley

When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.

By the time we've made it, we've had it.

Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.

If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig. (150)

Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.

I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure.

What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there.

It's amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir!

I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules.

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

Frustration is one of the greatest things in art; satisfaction is nothing.

I thought there were limits to human suffering. At Bir-Jdid, I was to discover that there were none

Her life's work was a fantastical pipe dream to the backers who had sanctioned the project but were now cutting back on what they considered frivolous expenditures.

That just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's just the way it is. But don't you believe them.

A backup plan means somewhere in my head, I think I might fail and that word is not in my vocabulary. Plus I'm too talented to fail.

The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.