Quotes About Perseverance

A real man doesn't waver in the face of what needs to be done," he said softly. "There are many acts of war. Many battles that take place off the field with no uniforms or offices in command. Sometimes, battle takes place on your kitchen floor.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

The Promise" Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

However many holes are in you, always there's room for another. However much you carry, you can hold more. "My Corkboard

What is usual is not what is always. As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back. Footsteps resume their clipped edges, birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear. Where were they? By what route did they return? A woman mute for years forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

My Hunger The way the high-wire walker must carry a pole to make her arms longer you carried me I carried you through this world.

But the best things in life never come easy—

Dig your well for yourself, and also for the people who will follow along after you.

And I knew then that I would have to live, and go on living: what sorrow it was; and still what sorrow ignites but does not consume my heart.

She says she's too old to fight and too fat to run, so she just has to rely on her good nature to survive.

When your father died, I thought I'd die too. But then your heart keeps beating, you keep taking breaths and getting hungry and needing sleep, so you know you're not dead. One day, something makes you laugh and you're ripped with guilt because you can. A month passes and then a year, and you've gone on with your life even knowing you couldn't, but you do.

draw on to change the circumstances she found herself in. She'd build a ladder with courage as a rung. Maybe kindness would lift her higher too. It was the image she fell asleep pondering.

The essential code must include . . . how to crawl from the wreckage when this life falters, how to plunge to the cellar of sorrow and grope for the ladder that might bring you back into some kind of light, no matter how dim or strange.

In the immortal words of Willie Stargell, trying to hit Koufax was like "trying to drink coffee with a fork.

There is no shame in strategic retreat if it lets you remain strong enough to go after the enemy later.

How might you feel if everything you tried was a little beyond your ability to succeed—and you were criticized for the efforts you made?

For someone so very good at math, it's stunning to discover how you struggle with single digits.

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.

Home wasn't built in a day.

i thought about the miseries people conceal and how they manage to survive.

There is no point in dwelling on dashed hopes or what might have been. I knew I had to clear my mind, learn from my mistakes, make peace with fate's little merry pranks, and forge ahead. The great truth of poker—and of life—can be summed up in two words: "Next hand.