Quotes About Effort

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there was no potato left - at least none worth speaking of.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do.  It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me.  I can sit and look at it for hours.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. (Chapter XV)

It is not that I object to work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Melhor trabalhar e fracassar do que passar a vida dormindo.

Um auf das Faltblatt für Leberpillen zurückzukommen, so trafen die Symptome ohne jeden Zweifel auf mich zu, vor allem das der 'generellen Aversion gegen physische und mentale Anstrengungen'. Man kann sich gar nicht vorstellen, wie ich darunter leide. Schon in meiner frühesten Kindheit war ich damit geschlagen. (...) 'Los, du faules Stück, steh auf und mach dich nützlich', hieß es immer, und keiner ahnte, dass ich eigentlich krank war.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to work; it facinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

The stuff that comes easy takes the most rewriting. And the stuff that comes hard reads the easiest (Writing for the Soul, p. 194).

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win! live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future! Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

to test is great to win is better

we are all trying to get to the same island, whether you swim, fly, surf or skydiving. What matters is when the red light comes on. Jerry Seinfeld to Michael Richards in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

We are all trying to get to the same island, whether you swim, fly, surf or skydiving. What matters is when the red light comes on. - to Michael Richards in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

He said he would try, but I guess he never got the chance. About the last thing I remember him saying was "Don't worry so much about it. It's not the sneakers that count, it's the feet.

Ambition is the intellectual equivalent of body odour.

we all just do the best we can. And that's enough.

Under normal circumstances, I'd have found his dorky effort to cater to what he imagined I liked to be hilarious, but I was light-years from normal. This new, dark world felt pretend. I had no idea how to behave.

But finding work worth doing and having people in your life worth doing it for…doing the best you can every day…that feels honorable to me.

Sometimes we forget that parenting, like love, is a verb. It takes effort and work to yield positive returns. There is an incredible amount of self-awareness involved in being a good parent. It requires us to look at what we do when we are tired and stressed and stretched to our limits. These actions are called our default settings. Our default settings are the actions and reactions we have when we are too tired to choose a better way.

the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate.

Should I dream of a day, in the future, when I'll no longer need the dictionary, the notebook, the pen? A day when I can read in Italian without tools, the way I read in English? Shouldn't that be the point of all this? I don't think so. When I read in Italian, I'm a more active reader, more involved, even if less skilled. I like the effort. I prefer the limitations. I know that in some way my ignorance is useful to me.

Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconcile, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willingfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, 'Listen to me'.