Quotes About Perseverance

When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

There are things we find only at our lowest depths. The idea of wings and then wings themselves. An ocean worth crossing one dark mile at a time. The whole of the sky.

Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for "beginnings." But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along.

The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.

Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That's marriage. You can't only say the words once and think they'll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them with all you've got.

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.

They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn't solve anything and didn't save anyone even a little bit? What then?

Whatever they were, they were living their lives, out there doing it, making their mistakes. Somehow I'd gotten stuck along the way […] and I didn't know how to free myself exactly.

If you guys can't make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

It's not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it.

Sometimes the only antidote for pain is more of it.

You're making something new. Don't forget that when it starts to hurt.

Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That's marriage. You can't only say the words once and think they'll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them out with all you've got.

If the raging waters had reached out to swallow me, I would have let them. I wanted to die that day—I did—and there'd been other times, too. Not many, but they were there, and as I watched Ernest twitch in an uneasy sleep, I couldn't help wondering if we all had them. And if so, if we survived them, was it by chance alone? Hours

I rarely knew what Jock was thinking. He worked hard, as

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

Where was that fierce girl now? I didn't feel any whisper of her stirring in me. I also had no way of knowing how much I was yet supposed to weather—when my father might return, or even if he would. The

Only trouble sticks to me with any regularity…but I'm learning to think that can shape a person, too.

In the center if the road, I saw a heavy black sewing machine on its side, as if it had crawled out onto the street to die.

He shook his head. "I see you trying to be tough skinned, but that makes sense. As a woman you'll have to work twice as hard for everything. I'm not sure I could do it." He lit a cigarette and drew on it, the end flaring red in the dark. When he released the held smoke, he looked at me. "I think you're rather brave, actually." Was

toughness isn't the same as strength

At Equator Ranch a decade before, his debut lambing had turned out only six surviving animals of four thousand ewes. Undaunted, he had burned through more of his inheritance (eighty thousand pounds, some claimed), replaced his stock, learned his hard lessons, and was now the most successful large-scale rancher in all of Kenya. Not

it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.

Those things are as real as anything else, though, and I'll have to fly through them. Straight through the sickening dips and air pockets, because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't.