Pushing Through Exhaustion Quotes

Being out there doing your best and what you're supposed to do, will energize you like nothing else. Living your purpose and destiny makes you feel alive and it gives you vitality. If you're tired, it's because you're not living your best life. It's time to start living your best life. It's time to live the life your're Destined to live. ~ Jeanette Coron

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She'd always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her. Then she'd kept going, plowing through children's books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did. ~ Meg Wolitzer

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once. ~ Sarah Bessey

The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one's second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one's mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existance of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort ... ~ Agnes Elizabeth Nee Ernst Meyer

Being in a relationship with some people is like pushing a boat through sand. I used to have the time and energy for that kind of nonsense, but not anymore. Relationships should be a wonderful journey of exploration and love; not grinding resistance. ~ Steve Maraboli

He is a demon, Clarissa," said Valentine, still in the same soft voice. "A demon with a man's face. I know how deceptive such monsters can be. Remember, I spared him once myself."
"Monster?" echoed Clary. She thought of Luke, Luke pushing her on the swings when she was five years old, higher, always higher; Luke at her graduation from middle school, camera clicking away like a proud father's; Luke sorting through each box of books as it arrived at his store, looking for anything she might like and putting it aside. Luke lifting her up to pull apples down from the trees near his farmhouse. Luke, whose place as her father this man was trying to take. "Luke isn't a monster," she said in a voice that matched Valentine's, steel for steel. "Or a murderer. You are."
"Clary!" It was Jace.
Clary ignored him. Her eyes were fixed on her father's cold black ones. "You murdered your wife's parents, not in battle but in cold blood," she said. "And I bet you murdered Michael Wayland and his little boy, too. Threw their bones in with my grandparents' so that my mother would think you and Jace were dead. Put your necklace around Michael Wayland's neck before you burned him so everyone would think those bones were yours. After all your talk about the untainted blood of the Clave - you didn't care at all about their blood or their innocence when you killed them, did you? Slaughtering old people and children in cold blood, that's monstrous. ~ Cassandra Clare

The reason you're going through what you're going through is to receive the things you've been praying for. ~ Jeanette Coron

It was too much. She reached between them, grasping his hand and finally, finally, pushing him against her. She leaned over him, meeting his eyes, seeing the dark pleasure in him, the tightly leashed need. His fingers slid through her soft curls, parting her secret folds, twisting, circling, guided by her hand at his wrist. His thumb stroked long and slow in a wicked loop that made her question her own sanity.
He watched her as she struggled under the weight of the pleasure, teasing her with his words as much as his fingers. "There, love? Is that where it feels good?"
She was lost to his wicked, encouraging words and his wicked, encouraging fingers, and she whispered her response, moving against him. And then he was touching her just as she wanted, circling her perfectly, stroking with exactly the right amount of pressure. It was as though he knew her body better than she did. It was as though her body belonged to him.
And perhaps it did.
One of his beautiful long fingers slid deep inside of her, the heel of his palm rocking against a point of acute, almost unbearable pleasure, and she called out his name, rocking against his touch, knowing that something incredible was about to happen.
"Michael," she whispered his name, wanting more. Wanting everything.
She was filled with desire and greed and she wanted him to never ever stop touching that most secret part of her. ~ Sarah MacLean

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior's 'I Have a Dream' speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It's all in Jimi's absurd and delirious guitar riffs. ~ Karl Wiggins

So after a long time of utilizing the American propaganda machine, along with official statements of lies, distortion and falsehood, the focus was basically turned on inciting the American public against Iraq and pushing them to accept the American administration's schemes of aggression as a fait accompli, as if it were the solution or the necessary rescue that would allow American citizens to live in security and stability, after what they had gone through in the September 11 attacks. ~ Naji Sabri

As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes.
It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try.
But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare. ~ PatriciaV. Davis

We have the misconception that competitiveness means winning at all costs, but that's not what competition is. Competition is just doing your best and not giving up. We all face a moment in a race or in a competition in which we want to give up. We can either give in and not keep pushing, or we can charge forward and work through it. ~ Lisa Rainsberger

Fatigue is your friend. Through exhaustion and through people just being so depleted, the stuff around the nerve endings gets worn away and other things begin to emerge and you take way bigger risks. ~ Lorne Michaels

For a moment we are weightless, eyes open and locked underwater, flowers drawn down with us, swirling around us in a current of white bubbles. My hair floats around us both like black silk. His hands are still around my waist, mine pressed against his bare chest. My lamp drifts between us.
Aladdin plants his feet against the bottom of the pool and kicks off, pushing us upward to burst through the surface. He gasps in air and shakes the wet hair from his eyes. Without pulling away, we float in silence, and I cannot take my gaze from him. Water runs down his cheeks and lips, dripping from his jaw. A lock of his hair is stuck to his forehead, and I gently lift it away, curling it around my finger before letting it go.
"What are we doing?" he whispers, pulling me closer.
I cannot reply. I don't trust my own voice. He brings his forehead down to rest against mine, and everything outside this pool and this moment ceases to exist. All that matters is the gentle sound of our breathing, our reflections on the water, the feel of his hands around me. ~ Jessica Khoury

Whatever actions may have been appropriate for your survival when you were a child, are probably no longer necessary. However, the ego cannot know that. It is like a computer program, reacting to life robotically; doing what it deems is most applicable in the present circumstance, according to past experience. The problem is, it often blocks you from feeling what is appropriate in the present moment, through its preconceived notions of what worked best in the past, and may not necessarily pertain any longer. For example you may resist intimacy now by pushing others away, in effect shut them out, because as a five year old you did the same in order to protect your vulnerability. ~ Paula Horan

Brioches are a light, pale yellow, faintly sweet kind of muffin with a characteristic blob on top, rather like a mushroom just pushing crookedly through the ground. Once eaten in Paris, they never taste as good anywhere else. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness. ~ Alain De Botton

The ground under their feet rolled violently as if a giant snake was pushing through. ~ A.O. Peart

Busta Rhymes the mighty infamous,
Always misbehaving and mischeivous,
Causing aggravation, I'll never pause,
Pushing out spit balls through plastic straws. ~ Busta Rhymes

We're always pushing through, hurrying on our long way, trying to get to some other place instead of enjoying the place we'd already got to. ~ Amelia Earhart

It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens. ~ Sarah Miller

I hate people who sneak into first class to use the bathroom. I'm sitting there, in 4F, sipping Cristal and admiring my new line of jewelry for QVC, and suddenly, busting through the curtain and rushing toward the bathroom is some doughy soccer mom holding her crotch and yelling, "Emergency, emergency!" No, it's not!!! Opening the main hatch and pushing you out at thirty thousand feet for disturbing me is an emergency. ~ Joan Rivers

Get up," I tell myself, "You go and make your dreams a reality. There's no use staying home and whine every time life beats you down. There's a meadow in the deep forest; you just have to keep pushing through. ~ Millicent Ashby

Hi" she said.
He gave her the sexiest crooked smile. "Hi." He stepped into her space, both his hands going to her hair, pushing it back off her face, just running his fingers through it. Touching her like he always did. "What was it you wanted?" he asked, no rush or urgency to his voice.
"You." The word fell from her lips unbidden, but she didn't' want to take it back. She didn't have time for anything but honesty. "Just you. ~ Laura Kaye

The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes. Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time. And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will. ~ Ronald D. Moore

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life - another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod - there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It's the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. ~ Liu Cixin

A breeze blows through the alley, pushing me to one side, and I think of scaling the Ferris wheel with Tobias. He kept me steady then. There is no one left to keep me steady now. ~ Veronica Roth

I start to run, and my nose fills with the smell of rain and wet earth. I run along the shoulder of the highway in an easy rhythm, and the rain gathers up on my forehead and eyebrows; it flows down my face, it drips from the tip of my nose. There is wet dirt, a puddle in the gravel, new grass pushing through old in the ditch. Violets grow along the edge of the road. To my right, the Little Jib River flows brown and swollen to the lake. The water moves ceaselessly, and I move along with it. To my left, across the road, the rain strips wilted cherry blossoms from the rows and rows of trees, and drops them to the ground. ~ Jon Harrison

Life is not about pushing your way through. Life is about allowing life to push through you. ~ Sadghuru

Hi, my name is Tess Embers.
A lot of thoughts are probably running through your mind right now. Who does this person think she is? Doesn't she know that you should never begin a story with a boring phrase like,'Hi, my name is...'? Doesn't she know to use a hook at the beginning to draw readers in instead of pushing them away?
Well, sorry, but I'm just a teenage girl and I don't necessarily want everyone to know everything about my life. Maybe I don't want to hook people. ~ Embee

I have no fucking clue how to handle this situation.
And now I'm the one who's scared.
This right here should be the line in the sand for me, I thnk. I can leave. Walk away. This is way more baggage than I need or want. I've already been in a high-drama relationship, and I don't need this in my life. These thoughts run through my brain quickly, like one of those silent movie reels, and as quickly as the enter, they leave.
Because instead of running as far away from this woman as possible, I slide in behind her, pushing her forward slightly so that I can wedge myself between her and the wall. I wrap myself around her. "Pulling you close and holding you tightly," I whisper. ~ Sidney Halston

While gently pushing her towards the dressing room, Lazarus ventured, "Can I ask you something kind of personal?"

Pulling her shirt over her head behind the curtain, and holding her hand out for the corset, she replied, "Anything for you, Laz."

"How are you still friends with him?"

"Can you hook this thing?" Holding the corset on her stomach, Lazarus peeked through the curtain, fingers deftly snapping the twenty hook-and-eye latches. "He saved my life. There are a million reasons to hate him, but there are a million and one reasons to forgive him for his faults."

Twisting to look in the mirror, adjusting her breasts in the tight silk, she continued, "He'll say the worst thing at the worst possible time, except every once in awhile, he says the one most perfect thing that just makes you want to cry from happiness. He knows the exact way you need to be touched at any moment, in any mood, like he's fucking telepathic. He'll make you want to scream when he ignores you, but then you find out he knows your favorite color, your favorite meal, what movie makes you cry and he can list every little thing in the entire world that you hate. And mostly? Well," Turning to face Lazarus and strike a pose, "I just can't fucking stop. ~ Shannon Noelle Long

Pushing ourselves to do too much despite the pain will not result in gain but may cause additional injury. However, sometimes we do need to push ourselves to get up and move around to avoid becoming stiff and actually increasing our pain. ~ Karen Lee Richards

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation. ~ Virginia Woolf

Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking - a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree - is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe - certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow. ~ Kenneth Grahame

I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti. ~ Anthony Burgess

The air in my home is heavy with my mom's unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she's in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards. You can hear her banging pots and pans or cursing the vacuum cleaner ~ Laura Buzo

As he rowed the launch toward Wensan's ship, which was Herrani-made and studded with Valorian cannon, Arin remembered the exhaustion of that work, but also how it had corded his muscles until the ache in his arms became stone. He was grateful to the Valorians for having made him strong. If he was strong enough, he might live through this night. If he lived, he could reclaim the shreds of who he had been, and explain himself to Kestrel in a way she would understand.
She sat silent next to him in the launch. The other Herrani at the oars watched as she lifted her bound hands to tug at the black cloth covering her hair. It was an awkard business. It was also necessary, since a new twist in the plan called for Kestrel to be seen and recognized.
The Herrani watched her struggle. They watched Arin drop an oar in its lock to offer a hand. She flinched hard enough that her shifted weight shook the boat It was only a slight tremor along wood, but they all felt it.
Shame ate into his gut.
Kestrel pulled the cloth from her head. Even though clouds swelled in the sky, swallowing the moon and deepening the dark around them, Kestrel's hair and pale skin seemed to glow. It looked like she was lit from within.
It wasn't something Arin could bear to see. He returned to the oars and rowed.
Arin knew, far better than any of the ten Herrani in the launch, that Kestrel could be devious. That he shouldn't trust her plan any more than he should have fallen for her ploy ~ Marie Rutkoski

I slammed the back door shut and gave Caspian a look.
He put both hands up in the air, "What? I didn't do anything."
"No. But you wanted to. And besides, we don't really know yet what can you do."
"Well, I know I can't make people disappear," he muttered darkly "or else he would have been gone a half an hour ago"
I was shocked at how serious he sounded, and then I looked into his eyes, "You're jealous!"
"He wanted to kiss you!"
Now I was dumbfounded, "How do you know that?"
"Because," he said, running a hand through his hair and pushing it back "It's what I'd want to do ~ Jessica Verday

One thing has always been consistent: Everyone wakes up tired. In truth, most of us go through the day tired, as if all of the information swirling through the air, all of the thoughts battling within our mind, leave us in a state of perpetual exhaustion. I don't know if it was always like this, but I'm pretty sure it's more like this now. ~ David Levithan

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet. ~ Mary Higgins Clark

The night following the reading, Gansey woke up to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn't certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.
Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. "Make it stop," he said.
Ronan's room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same weak, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he'd seen a scythe.
The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.
"What fresh hell is this?" Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.
Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted bac ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Why do you think Lara is Lara Casnoff, and Mrs. Casnoff is Mrs. Casnoff?" Elodie whispered as she worked her magic on the enchanted door. "It's her family name, right? So shouldn't she be Miss Casnoff? Or Ms.?"
Of all the things to wonder about, that's what you're focused on? Her marital status?
"It's weird, that's all I'm saying," she hissed in reply.
You know you can talk to me in my head, right? You don't have to talk out loud and make everyone think I'm a crazy person. Just FYI.
"The only time I can talk is when I'm in your body, so sue me, I'm taking advantage of that."
Before we could snipe at each other anymore, the door suddenly gave way. Pushing it open, Elodie dashed inside, closing the door behind her. Lara Casnoff's office was the total opposite of Mrs. Casnoff's, complete with soaring bookcases and a heavy wooden desk so brightly polished that I could see myself in it.
"Any idea on where we should start?" Elodie whispered.
The desk, I finally said. It'll be locked, and if it's anything like Mrs. Casnoff's desk, magic won't work on it. There's a nail in my pocket. Get it out, and I'll talk you through jimmying the lock.
Elodie's disdain flooded over me, but she got the nail and went to work on the lock. "Were you a burglar in the real world?" she muttered as she worked. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Every idea in this book runs against our natural tendency to want to relax, take it easy, reward ourselves for decades of work and childrearing. Our default mode at midlife is entropy. The default is not destiny, and on this, the research is unequivocal: for every fork in the road, you are almost invariably better off making the harder choice. Harder in the moment, that is, but easier over the years, as your body and mind remain strong. By resisting entropy, but pushing through the inertia the beckons us to rest a little longer, to slow down just a notch, until your life has narrowed to a pinprick – by resisting those forces, you dramatically up the odds that your life will be rich to your final breath, deeply entwined with family and friends, engaged in intellectual pursuits, and infused with a purpose that extends beyond yourself. Yes, it's hard.

Yes, it's worth it. ~ Barbara Bradley Hagerty