Quotes About Endurance

The hands were saying: Why do you hurt me like this?—but if you insist then I'll endure it.

We're back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world's crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance.

It's a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won't accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won't accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…

My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.

It's harder to come back than it is to arrive.

Elephants gave you less bother, any day.

At the end of life, parent and kinsman are as a blind man set to look after a burning lamp.

Where there had been peace, now there was endurance. "He will awake," said Nostradamus. "You took a great risk, but he will awake, if that is what you want for him.

I don't like to see things done badly on either. At the moment, I am tired of journeys. It is time I arrived somewhere.

Marriage, like law, is a practice. Aut bibat, aut abeat. Subscribe, or get out of it.

It cost something: it cost almost more than she could manage to fight, and to keep on fighting, by this time.

It was because these men, whatever their profession—philosopher, architect, lawyer, painter, doctor, artist and priest—were by force of the times they lived in soldiers also, and understood that speed and skill and toughness and above all self-confidence came from being pushed again and again and again past the edge of endurance until that limit became as elastic as an extra muscle, held in reserve.

From limbo, you cannot say forgive me, unless you can also say you regret what you have done. I have no regrets. I have nothing to tell you, except what you know already: that love is a powerful master. For his favours do you pay tribute and toll while flesh endures, and no doubt after.

He had survived that. He would survive this.

For how long can one maintain total vigilance? For how long can love last, in isolation, without sinking crushed beneath its own pressure?

Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity--births, widowhood, illnesses--and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well.

Even if it is the twilight of the world, before night falls I will sleep in your arms.' . . .

I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

But even a watched pot cannot absorb heat for ever.

Well, well. What can't be cured must be endured. This is our last hope gone. We shall be reduced to ringing minors.

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes.

Let the galled jade wince'—

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilisation that made them.