Tenacious Man Quotes

What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand? And didn’t that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.

The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.

His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context—nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is—some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.

At least one tribe, the Geln, strongly opposed attacking the Colonial Union, since humans were reasonably strong, distressingly tenacious and not especially principled when they felt threatened.

He quickly earned a reputation for being willing to take any job a man needed done, and the name Dirtyhands soon followed. He was an unskilled fighter, but a tenacious one. “You have no finesse,” a gambler at the Silver Garter once said to him. “No technique.” “Sure I do,” Kaz had responded. “I practice the art of ‘pull his shirt over his head and punch till you see blood.’” He

For pomp is a tenacious force. And a wily one too. How humbly it bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street. But then, having quietly bided its time, while helping the newly appointed leader on with his jacket, it compliments his appearance and suggests the wearing of a medal or two. Or, having served him at a formal dinner, it wonders aloud if a taller chair might not have been more fitting for a man with such responsibilities. The soldiers of the common man may toss the banners of the old regime on the victory pyre, but soon enough trumpets will blare and pomp will take its place at the side of the throne, having once again secured its dominion over history and kings. Nina

For pomp is a tenacious force. And a wily one too. How humbly it bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street. But then, having quietly bided its time, while helping the newly appointed leader on with his jacket, it compliments his appearance and suggests the wearing of a medal or two. Or, having served him at the formal dinner, it wonders aloud if a taller chair might not have been more fitting for a man with such responsibilities.

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one's soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one's own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.

Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man - he did not cry when his children died, he simply dug the graves and buried them - James was silent each time he killed a tree, thinking of its time spent in that spot. He never did this with the animals he hunted - they were food, and transient, passing through this world and out again, as people did. But trees felt permanent - until you had to cut them down.

And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

it is not the oppositions a man face that determine his rise or fall in life but his tenacity to dare to soar and to pursue to higher heights

our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another

At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back

What were miracles, but science that man didn't yet understand? And didn't that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?

So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth.

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

Sometimes when I recall the abominations of that barbarous Russian life I question whether they are worth dwelling on. But on further consideration I am convinced that they demand being exposed, for they are the vicious tenacious truth, which has not been exterminated to this very day. They represent a truth which must be exposed to its roots and torn out of our grim and shameful life - torn out of the very soul and memory of man. But there is another, more positive reason impelling me to describe such horrors. In spite of their repulsiveness and they way in which they mutilated what would otherwise be fine natures, the Russian is sufficiently young and wholesome in spirit to abolish such things and he will surely do so. Our life is amazing not only for the vigorous scum of bestiality with which it is overgrown, but also for the bright and wholesome creative forces gleaming beneath. And the influence of good is growing, giving promise that our people will at last awaken to a life full of beauty and bright humanity.

The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which should return to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply: "In former days." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition, to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force the past on the present, – this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists, who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus." As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.

The Desire To Paint" Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this desire. I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her. She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness. I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified grass. Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the smile of a large mouth ; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic land. There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.

To protect patrilineal descent, men have for centuries tried to control women's sexuality. Although man needs woman, he tries to keep her power under control, legislating against women's free use of her sex in case she compromises the fragile but tenacious social structure of our patriarchal society.

If the European grows accustomed not to rule, a generation and a half will be sufficient to bring the old continent, and the whole world along with it, into mortal inertia, intellectual sterility, universal barbarism. It is only the illusion of rule, and the discipline of responsibility which it entails, that can keep Western minds in tension. Science, art, technique, and all the rest live on the tonic atmosphere created by the consciousness of authority. If this is lacking, the European will gradually become degraded. Minds will no longer have the radical faith in themselves which impels them, energetic, daring, tenacious, towards the capture of great new ideas in every order of life. The European will inevitably become a day-to-day man. Incapable of creative, specialized effort, he will always be falling back on yesterday, on custom, on routine. He will turn into a commonplace, conventional, empty creature, like the Greeks of the decadence and those of the Byzantine epoch.

A horse can't endure even a month of the local winter life in a cold stall if it's worked hard hours in subzero weather. . . . But man lives on. Perhaps he lives by virtue of his hopes? But he doesn't have any hope . . . . . He is saved by a drive for self-preservation, a tenacious clinging to life, a physical tenacity to which his entire consciousness is subordinated. He lives on the same things as a bird or a dog, but he clings more strongly to life than they do. He has a greater endurance than that of any animal.

I miss the thoughts of you now... For in my head they over ran. But now, on unpretentious grounds... There's a grave with unearthed sand. You brought the color to my world, When I was content living in gray. But, now those colors are too bright, They tarnish all that they portray. I miss the thought of you, more than you... Because my thoughts left you unblemished. And I held on to them; with tenacious grip... But, like your honor, they diminished. For while my heart was sentient... You drug my name through the mire... And now when thoughts of you arise... They're just cinder in the fire. I miss the thoughts of you now... For in my head, you were amended... But, now in your place, Is a nameless face... Of a man who has descended.

And she does not feel jilted, even one year on. Ben was weak or, fatal combination, weak and good. Jilting implied, if not malice, then aforethought and he was considerate to a fault and not a planner. As he had confessed all those months ago he was not the powerful one in his marriage, not when Chloe was near enough to influence him. As the weeks wore on laura realised that whatever offstage battle had taken place, she had lost. Chloe might not love him more, but her love it seemed, had proved the most tenacious. And, who knew, perhaps she had surprised them both with her strength of feeling. Perhaps it had taken such a crisis for him finally to fall in love with her and he had woken to the novel wonder of her as a man returning from a fever would be astounded at the mundane pleasure of grapes or daisies.

And you approve of your future sister-in-law?” Cade asked. “Sure. Isabelle seems great.” Her sister, on the other hand . . . Huxley studied him as he slid on his boxer briefs. “What’s the ‘but’?” “No ‘but,’” Vaughn said. “I like Simon’s fiancée.” And, fortunately for him, she inherited all the good-natured genes in the family. Cade furrowed his brow. “There it is again—that look. Like you want to say more.” Vaughn scoffed at that as he pulled on his clothes. “There’s no look.” Cade pointed. “Huxley just put on his underwear. Not once, in the two years that you two have been partners, have you ever missed an opportunity to smirk at the fact that the man irons his boxer briefs.” “Hey. They fold neater that way. It saves space in the drawer,” Huxley said. Cade gave Vaughn a look. I rest my case. “So? What gives?” Vaughn took in the tenacious expression on his friend’s face and knew that any further denials would only bring on more questions. He sighed. “Fine.” He thought about where to begin. “Isabelle has a sister.” Huxley rolled his eyes. “Here we go.” “No, no. Not here we go. She and I are not going anywhere,” Vaughn said emphatically. “The woman’s a . . .” He paused, trying to think of the right word. He caught sight of another agent, Sam Wilkins, passing by their row of lockers. The man was a walking dictionary. “Hey, Wilkins—what’s that word you used the other day, to describe the female witness who kept arguing with you?” “Termagant,” Wilkins called over. “Means ‘quarrelsome woman.’” Vaughn nodded at Cade and Huxley in satisfaction, thinking that definition perfectly captured Sidney Sinclair. “There. She’s a termagant.” “It can also mean ‘vixen,’” Wilkins shouted from the next aisle over. “Thank you, Merriam-Webster,” Vaughn called back, with a half growl. “I think we’ve got it.” Cade raised an eyebrow teasingly. “So. Does the vixen have a name?” Yep, Vaughn had walked right into that one. “Sidney

Kevin tried to sleep with a pillow tight over his face, and he nearly suffocated himself. When he tiptoed over to close the door, they were talking in a subdued tone on the narrow couch. Colette's bare legs were curled up on the pillows, her head riding on the camelback motion of his chest. But her eyes were open, and she looked more adrift than comforted. In a tired baritone, Jerry was talking about prison. It was a horror story -- about the echoing screams of young kids and eyeballs cut open with smuggled razor blades, beginning as the usual speech about the hell he'd seen. But somehow it bcame a lonesome country-western love song, about how every long night of his life he had dreamed of a woman like her-- quick-witted and beautiful and tenacious. It was more than Kevin expected from the man. He told her that if he could buy her safe passage out of this life, hers and Kevin's, he would; but it was hard with a teenage son always pressing to know more and a tiring and insatiable young girlfriend who wanted to devour the world. Think of the pressure on him. "You need to know that we're together like this partly because of you. You keep us up and running. I know it and Kevin knows it. I'm not a good person, Colette -- I never claimed to be, I don't want to be, and you can't expect me to be. But look me in the eye and accept me as a snake, and I'll tell you whatever you're waiting to hear: I need you, I want you, I hurt for you, down in the dust, honey, down in the dust of my bones." She interrupted him with kisses that sounded like determined sips at a scalding drink.

who are always right, and are given to reminding us of it, are irritating; prophets are irritating, and Owen Meany is decidedly a prophet. Because I don’t start a novel until I know the ending, every novel of mine is predestined. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, it was not that much of a stretch to make the main character aware (to some degree) of his own predestination. After all, I am always aware of the predestination of my characters. In Owen’s case, he bears the terrible burden of foreseeing his own death. His tenacious faith tells him that even his death—like his size, like his voice, like practicing the shot—is for a reason. Separate from the Vietnam background and the apparent religious miracle, A Prayer for Owen Meany is also a novel about the loss of childhood, which I thought was best signified by the loss of a childhood friend. People are always losing things in my novels—not just, as Johnny Wheelwright does, a finger and a mother and a best friend. In my first novel, Setting Free the Bears, another best friend is lost—stung to death by bees! In my second and third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls,” a U.S. government official had stated, adding, “Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?…It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls," a U.S. government official had stated, adding, "Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?...It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.

We Americans, in spite of our decisive role in the final victory, have always had a defective understanding of the Great War. For us it was a short, comparatively painless, seemingly glorious episode. Our troops did not enter combat to any serious extent until the German offensive of the spring of 1918, the failure of that offensive left Germany terminally exhausted, and the next six months became a process of hammering away with our superior numbers and superior matériel until a doomed but tenacious enemy collapsed at last. We were encouraged—were taught—to see the war first as nothing more complicated than a contest between good and pure evil, then as the redemption of a decadent Europe by “our boys” as they swooped in to end a deadlock that without their intervention might have gone on until the last man was dead. This was a naïve view of an unfathomable tragedy, a war that nobody had wanted, and its effects on Americans’ understanding of themselves and the world and their place in the world have been poisonous. All Quiet arrived here as an antidote to our national triumphalism and exceptionalism. To whatever extent it continues to serve as an antidote today, so much the better.

The Gender Sonnet Woman means not weakling, but wonder. Woman means not obstinate, but original. Woman means not man-slave, but mother. Woman means not amorous, but amiable. Woman means not neurotic, but nimble. Man mustn't mean medieval, but moral. Man mustn't mean abusive, but affable. Man mustn't mean nefarious, but noble. Trans doesn't mean titillating, but tenacious. Trans doesn't mean riff-raff, but radiant. It doesn't mean abhorrent, but affectionate. It ain't nasty and sick, but nerved and sentient. Gender has no role in society except in bed. Person is known by character, not dongs 'n peaches.

While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth. It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market. Nor did this derivative bondage end when formal slavery gave way to the de-facto slavery of discrimination. To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them, because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors. It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.

The persistence of superannuated institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of a rancid odour clinging to the hair; the pretension of spoiled fish that insists on being eaten, the tenacious folly of a child's garment trying to clothe a man, or the tenderness of a corpse returning to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" exclaims the garment. "I shielded you in weakness. Why do you reject me now?" "I come from the depths of the sea," says the fish; "I was once a rose," cries the odour; "I loved you," murmurs the corpse; "I civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply; "In the past." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of things dead and the government of mankind by embalming; to restore dilapidated dogmas, regild the shrines, replaster the cloisters, reconsecrate the reliquaries, revamp old superstitions, replenish fading fanaticism, put new handles in worn-out sprinkling brushes, reconstitute monasticism; to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites; to foist the past upon the present, all this seems strange. There are, however, advocates for such theories as these. These theorists, men of mind too, in other things, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a coating of what they term divine right, respect for our forefathers, time-honored authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy; and they go about, shouting, "Here! take this, good people!" This logic was familiar to the ancients; their soothsayers practised it. Rubbing over a black heifer with chalk, they would exclaim, "She is white" Bos cretatus. As for ourselves, we distribute our respect, here and there, and spare the past entirely, provided it will but consent to be dead. But, if it insists upon being alive, we attack it and endeavor to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them, body to body, and make war upon them and that, too, without cessation; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash upon the ground.

He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead… But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

What would happen, wonders Borges, if due to his belief in these fantasies, Don Quixote attacks and kills a real person? Borges asks a fundamental question about the human condition: what happens when the yarn spun by our narrating self causes grievous harm to ourselves or those around us? There are three main possibilities, says Borges. One option is that nothing much happens. Don Quixote will not be bothered at all by killing a real man. His delusions are so overpowering that he will not be able to recognise the difference between committing actual mored and his duelling with imaginary windmill giants. Another option is that once he takes a person’s life, Don Quixote will be so horrified that he will be shaken out of his delusions. This is akin to a young recruit who goes to war believing that it is good to die for one’s country, only to end up completely disillusioned by the realities of warfare. But there is a third option, much more complex and profound. As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However, once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they will give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused. In politics this is known as ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’ syndrome.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

Aye, he thought, loyalty, that most irrevocable of clan codes, was a point of honor more fiercely and tenaciously held than a man's life; the rudest clansman seemed to be born with it in the marrow of his bones.

From my own experience, after my time in the colonies, I know that a man home from war has much to deal with that is not within sight of his family, but in his head and his heart. The demons of war can be dark and tenacious, distorting even the obvious goodness in life. Past and present become entangled with a soldier’s confusion and self-reproach for living when others perished, and with his need to make life as it once was. Except he cannot go back, because time has passed and people have changed and learned to live without him.

Tenacity is more than hanging on, which may be but the weakness of being too afraid to fall off. Tenacity is the supreme effort of a man refusing to believe that his hero is going to be conquered. . . . Remain spiritually tenacious Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

Still, separation continues to masquerade as strength, and your politics, your economics, and even your religions have perpetuated the lie. This lie is the genesis of all wars and all the class struggles that lead to war; of all animosity between races and genders, and all the power struggles that lead to animosity; of all personal trials and tribulations, and all the internal struggles that lead to tribulations. Still, you cling to the lie tenaciously, no matter where you’ve seen it lead you—even as it has led you to your own destruction. Now I tell you this: Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. There is no separation. Not from each other, not from God, and not from anything that is. This truth I will repeat over and over on these pages. This observation I will make again and again. Act as if you were separate from nothing, and no one, and you will heal your world tomorrow. This is the greatest secret of all time. It is the answer for which man has searched for millennia. It

Grand Provost.” Rava’s voice, clear and crisp, startled me. She stood to my left, in the doorway of her office, and I had the impression she had been watching for me. “Come in for a moment.” The Cokyrian second-in-command retreated into her alcove, and I followed, closing the door as she went to stand behind her desk. “How much power do you think he has?” she asked contemptuously, straightening her black tunic with a hard tug on the bottom. “I don’t understand.” I tenaciously met her eyes, despite the dread creeping along my spine. It was obvious she had overheard my conversation with Narian. “I understand the influence you have all too well. The commander will do exactly what you want, bend to your will. That alone should prove to you that strength is a woman’s endowment, not a man’s.” She was testing me, taunting me, and I resented her for it. “Are you going to continue with cryptic comments or are you going to say what you mean?” I demanded, rallying to take the offensive. “You may love Nantilam’s little prince, but you’re blind to the fact that he is an instrument. He has been from the beginning and he always will be, until she has no further use for him. Nantilam cares for him and would rather see him alive than dead, but she will not listen to him, or to words he bears from you. I have her ear. She will listen only to the most powerful woman n this godforsaken province, and that woman is me.” She was baiting me, successfully; I was on the verge of losing my temper. Knowing that would be a mistake, I let the silence between us lengthen, taking several slow and steady breaths. Then I gave her a small smile. “The High Priestess made me Grand Provost because she wanted a woman in control who would understand the people. You do not understand my people, Rava. You keep them miserable because you fear them. And everything else aside, that makes you weak.” Though Rava glowered at me, I was done with her, and coolly left her office. I could almost feel the slow tick of time, counting down to Narian’s return. He would prove one of us right and one of us wrong.

a man be wise it is no shame for him to live and learn.’ Sophocles.

Krishna: "Victory and defeat are the same. To Act but not to reflect on the fruit of the Act. Seek Detachment. Fight without Desire." Arjuna: "You say, forget desire, seek detachment!! Yet you urge me to battle to massacre! Your words are ambiguous, I am confused." Krishna: "Don’t withdraw into solitude. Renunciation is not enough. You must Act. Yet Action must not dominate you. In the heart of Action you must remain free from all attachments." Arjuna: "How can I put into practice what you are demanding of me? The mind is capricious, unstable; it’s evasive, feverish, turbulent, tenacious. It’s harder to subdue than taming the wind." Krishna: "You must learn to see with the same eye, a mound of earth and a heap of gold, a cow, a sage, a dog and a man who eats the dog. There is another intelligence, beyond the mind.

The women who had passed transiently through his life would have likely all agreed that the sunburned Scottish expat possessed the kind of rugged features that promised exotic adventure—the inviting raffishness of a prom date who shows up wearing a scuffed leather jacket, riding a motorcycle with a strategically defective exhaust pipe. In reality, he had just the unkempt, haggard visage of a man who smoked too many unfiltered Dunhill cigarettes, wore too little sunblock, and long suffered from a malaise of which the only palliation seemed to come from roaming about the wilds of Africa in search of something tenacious enough to kill him.

He was the most confounding man. How could a tenacious industrialist and reputed rake be…caring?

In 2008, Donald Trump published a book with Meredith McIver titled Never Give Up. In it he compiled what he labeled his “Top 10 List for Success.” The items on his list are so close to Peale’s prescriptions that it worth listing them as they are deeply built into Trump’s self-psychology. Despite being written over ten years ago, one can see all these elements of Trump’s current rhetoric and conduct. Trump’s ten rules include: 1. Never give up! Do not settle for remaining in your comfort zone. Remaining complacent is a good way to get nowhere. 2. Be passionate! If you love what you’re doing, it will never seem like work. 3. Be focused! Ask yourself: What should I be thinking about right now? Shut out interference. In this age of multitasking, this is a valuable technique to acquire. 4. Keep your momentum! Listen, apply, and move forward. Do not procrastinate. 5. See yourself as victorious! That will focus you in the right direction. 6. Be tenacious! Being stubborn can work wonders. 7. Be lucky! The old saying: ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get’ is absolutely right on. 8. Believe in yourself! If you don’t, no one else will either. Think of yourself as a one-man army. 9. Ask yourself: What am I pretending not to see? There may be some great opportunities right around you, even if things aren’t looking so great. Great adversity can turn into a great victory. 10. Look at the solution, not the problem. And never give up! Never, never, never give up.

There are twin challenges that seek to curtail man's advances. Their combination paralyzes meaningful efforts, scuttles dreams and ambitions, and dims the light of hope. FEAR cripples. COMPLACENCY kills advances. FEAR is behind the flagging zeal of many. FEAR suggests a retreat and dampens enthusiasm. What we call lethargy is actually the FEAR of the unknown, and particularly of failure. FEAR lets us imagine the shame of failure long before we make a move and strongly suggests that we play safe. True, a ship is safe in the harbour; but is that what a ship is created for? Isn't a ship meant for a sojourn- troubled and dangerous as it may be? Each time we overcome our FEARS, we break new grounds. Every successful man or woman knows the joy of triumphing over their FEARS. FEAR stands by cowardly as they walk to the success podium. It is the turn of FEAR to fear. But soon after, COMPLACENCY makes its move on the successful man or woman. It softly but tenaciously asserts: What else is there to achieve? You might not be lucky the next time around, you know. Why not dwell safely on this mountain? COMPLACENCY kills ambitions softly. So, if you desire is to be the best God has ordained you to be, you must run against your FEARS prayerfully and tenaciously until you win. And when you have won, don't let COMPLACENCY force you to sit back and watch your trophies; just keep running. Run, baby! Run!

You look as if you’ve just lost your best friend.” Eve took a place beside Jenny on this observation, which leavened Jenny’s sense of desolation with a spike of resentment. “With all my family around me, how could I possibly be in want of companionship?” Eve watched their mutual siblings stepping through a minuet while their brother Valentine held forth at the piano. “The same way I can long to dance while the minuet plays all around me.” Marriage had settled Eve, and impending motherhood had only honed her already formidable instincts. “You’re admiring your husband, Lady Deene, even when you can’t dance with him.” “He’s promised me a waltz, though Valentine will probably find one to play at the speed of a dirge.” She fell silent for a moment as the dancers one-two-three’d around the space created by the music room and an adjoining parlor. “You would make a wonderful mother, Jenny.” The worst pain was not in the words Eve offered, but the combination of pleading and pity with which she offered them. “Becoming a mother usually contemplates becoming a wife first, and I’ve no wish to wed some man for the sole purpose of bearing his babies.” Not the sole purpose… As the dancers twirled and smiled, it occurred to Jenny that Victor had made her promise not to stop painting, but he hadn’t said anything specific about eschewing motherhood. Had he? Another pause in the conversation, while the music played on. Eve, however, was notably tenacious, so Jenny waited for the next salvo, and Eve did not disappoint. “You look at Bernward the way I look at Deene, the way Maggie looks at Benjamin, the way—” “Louisa looks at Joseph, I suppose.” And Sophie at her baron too, of course. They needn’t start on how the Windham brothers regarded their respective wives. “Louisa’s gaze is a touch more voracious. I was going to say, the way Mama looks at Papa.” Ouch. Ouch, indeed. The duke and duchess turned down the room with the grace of a more elegant age, and yet, their gazes spoke volumes about the sheer pleasure of sharing a dance. Jenny stated the obvious as matter-of-factly as possible. “Their Graces dance beautifully.” Eve’s feet were propped on a hassock. She wiggled her toes in time with the music, the left and right foot partnering each other. “Bernward also dances quite well.” Elijah was dancing with Valentine’s lady, Ellen’s preferred partner being ensconced at the keyboard, as usual. “Bernward is dancing carefully, lest Valentine take exception.” Eve twitched her skirts. “Bernward is dancing with one eye on you, you ninnyhammer, and with the certain knowledge that all three of our brothers are waiting for him to come over here and get you to stand up with him. How many more times do you think you can check on the punch bowl between sets without Bernward taking insult?” Check

Reader, do you seek to realize the birth into Truth? There is only one way: Let self die. All those lusts, appetites, desires, opinions, limited conceptions and prejudices to which you have hitherto so tenaciously clung, let them fall from you. Let them no longer hold you in bondage, and Truth will be yours. Cease to look upon your own religion as superior to all others, and strive humbly to learn the supreme lesson of charity. No longer cling to the idea, so productive of strife and sorrow, that the Savior whom you worship is the only Savior, and that the Savior whom your brother worships with equal sincerity and ardor is an imposter; but seek diligently the path of holiness, and then you will realize that every holy man is a savior of mankind.

Give me the choice between a man of tremendous brains and ability but without tenacity, and one of ordinary brains but with a great deal of tenacity and I will select the tenacious one every time.

The moral nature of man is more tenacious of life than the physical, and grief never kills.

In my life I've done more suffering than thinking— though I believe one understands better that way. You see, dogs aren't enough any more. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants. . . It seems that the elephants Morel was trying to save were purely imaginary and symbolic, a parable, as they say, and that the poor bastard was really defending the old human rights, the rights of man, those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals of another age - another geological epoch. . . you announce this salvation as coming *soon’— though I suppose that in the language of paleontology, which is not exactly that of human suffering, the word soon’ means a few trifling hun- dred thousands of years. Earth was his kingdom, his place, his field— he belonged. . The lorry was literally stuffed with ‘trophies’: tusks, tails, heads, skins— an orgy of butch- ery. De Vries, was certainly not collecting for museums, because most of them had been so riddled with shot as to be unrecognizable and in any case unsuitable for the pleasure of the eye. I suppose there are things that nothing can kill and that remain forever intact. It’s as if nothing could ever j^ppen to human beings. They’re a species over which it’s not easy to triumph. They’ve a way of rising from the ashes, smiling and holding hands. "Well, I finally got an idea. When he fails, do like me: think about free elephant ride through Africa for hundreds and hundreds of wonderful animals that nothing could be built—either a wall or a fence of barbed wire—passing large open spaces and crush everything in its path, and destroying everything—while they live, nothing is able to stop them—what freedom! And even when they are no longer alive, who knows, perhaps continue to race elsewhere still free. So you begin to torment your claustrophobia, barbed wire, reinforced concrete, complete materialism imagine herds of elephants of freedom, follow them with his eyes never left them on their run and will see you soon feel better ... " years of isolation in the depths of the jungle have no power against a tenacious hope, and that a hundred acres of land at the height of the rainy season are easier to clear than are certain little intimate nooks of our soul. she understood perfectly well how unconvincing this sounded, but she couldn’t help it: it was the truth. He felt that, at his age, patience was ceasing to be a virtue and was becoming a luxury he could less and less afford. He strove for one last time to look at the affair with all the detachment and all the serenity suitable to a man of science. the immense sky, filled with absence. with the impassive face of a man who feels perfectly sure of having the last word. Of course to the pure all things are pure.

If you remember anything I've taught you, I hope it's to treat people well, especially your family. THAT will make you a man. -Dad to Golden

It always astonishes me to discover people who think that religion and sex have nothing to do with one another, and that you can act as you like in the one sphere while thinking what you should in the other. In fact, of all the rites of passage that religions have taken under their wing, that of sexual initiation has been by the most tenaciously adhered to. English people today look with incredulity on the habit in some Muslim communities of veiling and hiding women, of forcing them to marry the man chosen for them, and of occasionally killing them for 'honour's' sake. What can this possibly have to do with obedience to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, they ask themselves? In fact, it has everything to do with it. Sex is not only the gateway through which the next generation enters the community; it is the place in which our actions are most unavoidably subject to the ethic of 'pollution and taboo'.

Just do what Colonel Sanders did.” At the age of 66, he lost his business and began to live on his Social Security check. It wasn’t enough. He went around the country selling his recipe for fried chicken. He was turned down 1,009 times before someone said yes. And he went on to become a multimillionaire at an age when most people are quitting. “He was a brave and tenacious man,” rich dad said of Harlan Sanders.

powerful story showcasing shiitake’s healing properties involves a young teenage celebrity I know who was quietly suffering from a particularly pervasive and tenacious case of acne. Though he was using aggressive treatments, his skin was increasingly becoming a source of stress on his professional life as a public figure. The young man started taking 1,500 milligrams of shiitake extract, stopped taking his prescription, and in about a month his skin had cleared considerably, improving until the acne was completely gone.

I was on a stool at the counter of the Look Diner, moving my scrambled eggs around the plate in the coagulating pool of ketchup and staring at my gray coffee, when the man walked in carrying his brain in his cupped hands. The man wore a wrinkled gray suit over a pristine white Arrow shirt. He was of indeterminate age, with flattened dank hair and skin as white as his shirt. His mouth was agape, his eyes glazed with fear. He dropped down onto the stool next to mine, his legs slackening. Wordlessly, I slid over a bowl empty save a few tenacious flakes of dried oatmeal. Without acknowledging me, the man gingerly placed his brain in the bowl.

Quick, man! Cling tenaciously to my buttocks!

Come on a picnic with me,” he said. It wasn’t an invitation, but an order. Color pulsed in Lily’s cheeks, and she blinked, astounded at the man’s arrogance. “I don’t think that would be proper,” she replied when she’d recovered a little. “After all, we hardly know each other.” Caleb sighed and replaced his hat. “And you obviously mean to see that we never do.” He sounded resigned and slightly wounded, and in spite of herself Lily was sorry about that. She did find the major attractive, if entirely too tenacious. “I’ll go if you can get Mrs. McAllister’s permission,” she said, feeling proud of her resourcefulness. The twinkle in Caleb’s eyes said he knew she expected her landlady to refuse the request without mincing words, but he turned and sought out that good woman in the crowd, where she stood chatting with two members of the choir. Lily watched in mingled amazement and ire as Caleb made his way toward Mrs. McAllister, carrying his hat. He spoke politely to the woman, who rested one hand against her breast in delighted surprise and beamed up at him. Presently Caleb returned, looking damnably pleased with himself. “She says I’m to have you back before sundown,” he announced. If Lily had been holding anything other than a Bible, she would have flung it down in pure exasperation. At the same moment, inexplicably, she wanted to kiss Mrs. McAllister for giving the picnic her blessing. “Just how did you manage that?” she demanded as Caleb put his hat back on with a cocky flourish. “I’m a very persuasive man,” he replied, offering his arm. Grudgingly, Lily took it. “And a very arrogant one.” Caleb chuckled. “So I’ve been told.” They

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment.

Poppy turned toward the stranger, who had come into the room and closed the concealed door. It was difficult to ascertain his age—he appeared to be on the early side of his thirties, but there was an air of hard-bitten worldliness about him, a sense that he had seen enough of life to cease being surprised by anything. He had heavy, well-cut hair, black as midnight, and a fair complexion in which his dark brows stood out in striking contrast. And he was as handsome as Lucifer, his brows strong, the nose straight and defined, the mouth brooding. The angle of his jaw was sharp, tenacious, anchoring the grave features of a man who perhaps took everything—including himself—a bit too seriously. Poppy felt herself flush as she stared into a pair of remarkable eyes . . . intense cool green with dark rims, shadowed by bristly black lashes. His gaze seemed to take her in, consuming every detail. She noticed faint shadows beneath his eyes, but they did nothing to impair his hard-faced good looks.

The man who justly lives, tenacious of the right, In low estate is never low to wise man's sight.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one’s soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one’s own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.

Rich dad gave me a way of looking at Chicken Little. “Just do what Colonel Sanders did.” At the age of 66, he lost his business and began to live on his Social Security check. It wasn’t enough. He went around the country selling his recipe for fried chicken. He was turned down 1,009 times before someone said yes. And he went on to become a multimillionaire at an age when most people are quitting. “He was a brave and tenacious man,” rich dad said of Harlan Sanders. So when you’re in doubt and feeling a little afraid, just do what Colonel Sanders did to his little chicken. He fried it.