Quotes About Perseverance

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters--Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on--and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly.

Often it was the most unlikely people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best.

When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there's nothing wrong with my skills.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.

there are only some many times you can utter It does not hurt before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.

I'd lost count of the disappointments.

For how long could we fail until we surrendered?

Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

I promised myself I wouldn't be the first to look away, but I was.

Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis.

There was a single thought in my head: Keep thinking. Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive, and thinking is killing me. I think and think and think.

There are only so many times that you can utter 'It does not hurt' before it begins to hurt more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.

Dad used to say that sometimes you have to put your fears in order...

I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how. After

D'après toi, pourquoi es-tu ici, Oskar ? - Je suis ici, docteur, parce que maman est inquiète que la vie me mette devant des difficultés insurmontables. - Est-ce qu'elle a raison de s'inquiéter ? - Pas vraiment. La vie est une difficulté insurmontable.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

Julia Bloch: 43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she's never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

Every morning, she'd clean me of my excrement, bathe me, dress me, and see that my hair was combed like a sane man's, even when it meant an elbow to the nose or a broken rib. She polished the blade. She wore my teeth marks on her body like other wives might wear jewelry. The hole didn't' matter. We paid it no attention. We shared a room. She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that's love.