Quotes about Perseverance

Anne Lamott's priest friend Tom, how to get through: Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Salon April 25, 2003

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.

It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

We're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.

Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã…"This shit has got to stop.

When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again.

The truth is that your spirits don't rise until you get way down.

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.

If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder.

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can't be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.