• "Endurance comes only from enduring. / With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope, / And climbed it and it held me."

Czeslaw Milosz, from New and Collected Poems (1931-2001); “The Magic Mountain”

• "Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

• "Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know/ what despair is; then/ winter should have meaning for you."

from Snowdrops, by Louise Glück

• "Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, so what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what."

Andy Warhol

• "He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed, but from what worried him."

Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker

• "But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue."

Augusten Burroughs, This is How

• "I don’t know what’s to become of us. we need a lot of luck. and mine’s been bad lately. and the sun is getting nearer. and, Life, as ugly as it seems, does seem worth 3 or 4 more days. think we’ll make it?"

Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

• "Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement."

Albert Camus, The Fall

• "inmensumne noctis aequor confecimus? have we made it across the vast plain of night?"

Anne Carson, from Nox

• "One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance."

Franz Kafka, Diaries

• "Because of absence, the place that lets the light through, / Gives it strength."

Sandra Alcosser, from “Skiing by Moonlight,” except by nature (Graywolf Press, 1998)

• "Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day."

A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

• "A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going."

Bhanu Kapil, “Text to Complete a Text” from Incubation: A Space for Monsters

• "I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is not ease for the heart to be had from words of reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds."

Samuel Beckett

• “I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you.”

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

• "Today I will walk in the sun. I will simply walk in the sun."

Charles Bukowski, from “a letter to Ann Bauman,“ Screams From The Balcony: Selected Letters 1960 - 1970 ( HarperCollins e-books, 2009)

• "JASON: Put aside your venom and you might get somewhere."

Euripides, tr. by Celia Luschnig, from “Medea,”