Quotes About Commitment

I know it's hard to write, darling. But it's harder not to. The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.

It's folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.

I'd entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: ... Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

Writing is hard for every last one of us… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

I was working too hard to be afraid.

our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

They're tortured by indecision and guilt and lust. They love X but want to fuck Z. It is the plight of almost every monogamous person at one time or another. We all love X but want to fuck Z.

Will you do it later or will you do it now?

a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith.

And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard.

quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, where we say we love them or not.

Honor is inconvenient and absolute. Honor is looking it square in the face and taking it on the chin. It's having the guts to break someones heart so as to avoid fucking with his or her head.

there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it. And then there was the real live truly doing it. The staying and doing it, in spite of everything.

Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.

Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn't.