Stay strong! Your test will become your test-imony, your mess will become your mess-age.

Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.

She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.

She was going about her life, taking her pleasures as she found them, suffering what was hers to suffer, doing what she had to do. She had about her no air of self-pity or complaint. And this could only have been because, in her own heart, she was not pitying herself or complaining.

But there, in her diminishment, she seemed to resemble only herself, as if suffering finally had singled her out.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.

Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.