Quotes about Perseverance

Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do-- you can either type or kill yourself.

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.