Quotes About Perseverance

My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to.

Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

Slow" works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.

Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.

Jesus, sixty-six years old. He'd hoped that by now he wouldn't have to be so vigilant, that given enough time the madness--because that's what his spells amounted to--would ebb.

Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you'd fire for laziness. Only when you'd fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.

Because—and don't let anybody tell you different—novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.

The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In

Anne herself was no stranger to adversity, but she had always hated any situation that could only be endured. She was able to summon the necessary courage for a bold, confident stroke, but simply getting by left her dispirited, and it seemed that the older she got, the more frequent these situations became.

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

Indeed, a good hint that you've entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up.

But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.

I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.

The contest is a lion fight. So chin up, put your shoulders back, walk proud, strut a little. Don't lick your wounds. Celebrate them. The scars you bear are the sign of a competitor. You're in a lion's fight. Just because you didn't win doesn't mean you don't know how to roar.

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human

the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience.

He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.

An organic wish to cease to be, to stop living, seized him. Either he was too weak, or the world was too strong; he did not know which. Over and over he had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed.

Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man.

Hope that one has chanced upon the road back to the way things used to be is apparently a strong desire in those who've been locked outside their previous lives.

It is a gradual kind of strengthening. It takes a long time to see how the losses build you up, rather than strip you down and wear you away.