Quotes About Endurance

A virgin with a dish of gold, it was said, could walk unmolested from China to Turkey.

If we force ourselves to press on, a surprising thing happens. The fatigue gets worse, up to a point, then suddenly vanishes, and we feel better than before.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood--all the Nickel boys--existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

It was not enough to survive, you have to live—

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.

Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn't, we'd have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one's attention.

Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention. She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers.

Then it comes, always—the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The

Gnaw on a disappointment long enough and it will lose all flavor.

The peculiar institution made Cora into a maker of lists as well. In her inventory of loss, people were not reduced to sums, but multiplied by their kindnesses.

them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.

Colson Whitehead

If you weren't a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren't much of a man.

Her new life required a different sort of strength. She was meticulous in her posture, a walking spear, in the manner of those who'd been made to bend and will bend no more.

The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that

Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob—Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he'd make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he'd make it through.

all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering. You can do it.

Nie chodzi tylko o to, ?eby przetrwa?, ale aby ?y?.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one's attention.

Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down.

Cora remembered Caesar's words about the men at the factory who were hunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.