Edna O'Brien Quotes

Though hope is frail, it's hard to kill.

The word impossible does not exist for me. I've got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die - and might keep on fighting afterward ... depends on where I am.

I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.

I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death.

I'm pretty gritty.

Tough, gritty, those are things that have been in me since I was a little kid.

We will fight in every valley, in every street, in every oasis, and every town. We won't surrender again; we are not women; we will keep fighting.

Count 10 over him - he'll get up

There are no impossible obstacles; there are just stronger and weaker wills, that’s all!

I guess I'm a survivor. There are many of us survivors and any successful woman of my age has somewhat of that in her.

Endurance is the crowning quality.

I am convinced that floods of personal disaster can never drown a determined revolutionary nor can the cumulus of misery that accompanies tragedy suffocate him.

If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, ''Here comes number seventy-one!''

No matter how hot the fire burns, a Protea always survives

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.

The stronger the winds, the deeper the roots, and the longer the winds, the more beautiful the tree.

Only yield when you must, never "give up the ship," but fight on to the last "with a stiff upper lip!

Gracie: "Don't give up, Blanche. Women don't do that. Look at Betsy Ross, Martha Washington-they didn't give up. Look at Nina Jones." Blanche Morton: "Nina Jones?" Gracie: "I've never heard of her either, because she gave up."

No hardy perennial has the enduring quality of hope. Cut it to the roots, stamp it underfoot, let frost and fire work their will, and still some valiant shoot will push, to grow again on such scanty fare as it can find. Only time and the cruel quicklime of fact can destroy that stubborn urgency.

As a building is resistant to forces acting upon it, a person must be equally tenacious in life.

Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.

Hardships and handicaps can...stimulate our energy to survive them. You'll find if you study the lives of people who've accomplished things, it's often been done with the help of great willpower in overcoming this and that.

There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, "We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail."