Quotes & Sayings About Long Hard Days

I think I know I've been working very hard for the family business, sometimes those days are long days and I think if I know I'm working hard and pulling my weight, both working and playing hard at the same time, I think everyone who I work with can see I am there pulling my weight. — Kate Middleton

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else
an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood
or it may be easier to blame the map you were given
folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print
but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way. — Nick Flynn

I'm taking this slow. I've waited far too long for this to be over in a minute." He slips his hand behind my neck and grips me there. "I'm going to relish every inch of your body until you're begging for release. Then, I'm going to fuck you so hard, so good, that you'll still feel me inside you days later. — Karina Halle

Hard work certainly goes a long way. These days a lot of people work hard, so you have to make sure you work even harder and really dedicate yourself to what you are doing and setting out to achieve. — Lakshmi Mittal

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. — Joan Didion

I was a member of the Nationalist Party for several years. I don't remember how long. Those were very dreary days, because the Nationalist Party ... it's hard to describe what it was. I suppose it held on to some kind of little faith, you know? It wasn't even sure what the faith was, and it was a very despised enterprise by everybody. — Brian Friel

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. — Marcel Proust

I do enjoy making videos, even though they are long days and very hard work. — Tanya Tucker

All of the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European-North American travelers came and went, making those brisk, no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named the Milano. — Kiran Desai

The music director, Stephen Oremus, was telling me: "I hope you've done your work." We only have ten days rehearsal. The music is no joke. My solo singing is not that hard. But the stuff I have as part of the choir or as a "Dead Guest" in the second-half ... I'm singing some really incredible chorus stuff that I haven't done in a long time. It's extremely difficult. — Max Von Essen

I know that change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that it is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten. — Veronica Roth

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path. — Jeanette Winterson

Harry looked around; there was Ginny running toward him; she had a hard blazing look in her face as she threw her arms around him. And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her. After several long moments, or it might have been half an hour-or possibly several sunlit days- they broke apart. — J.K. Rowling

He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple. — Neil Gaiman

Easy squeezed her hand and tugged her closer. She sucked in a breath, sure he was going to kiss her. He did. Just not how she'd thought. His lips pressed to her forehead, then he pulled back to look her in the eye. I see a woman who's made me fell more alive in the past few days than I have in a long, long time. — Laura Kaye

A year seems very long to wait before I see them, but remind them that while we wait we may all work, so these hard days need not be wasted. I know they will remember all I said to them, that they will be loving children to you, will do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women. — Louisa May Alcott

Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days and months and years must be passed in the chase of that bubble, reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still. — Donald Grant Mitchell

Another year passed on . The waves of time seemed long since to have swept away all trace of poor Mary Barton. But her husband still thought of her, although with a calm and quiet grief, in the silent watches of the night :And Mary would start from her hard-earned sleep,and think in her half dreamy, half awakened state, she saw her mother stand by her bed-side ,as she used to do 'in the days of long-ago'; with shaded candle and an expression of ineffable tenderness, while she looked on her sleeping child. — Elizabeth Gaskell

A mimosa tree, green and thin limbed, pushes up through the snow. My grandmother brought the seeds with her
from back home.
Sometimes, she pulls a chair to the window, looks
down over the yard.
The promise of glittering sidewalks feels a long time
behind us now, no diamonds anywhere to be found.
But some days, just after snow falls,
the sun comes out, shines down on the promise
of that tree from back home joining us here.
Shines down over the bright white ground.
And on those days, so much light and warmth fills
the room that it's hard not to believe
in a little bit
of everything. — Jacqueline Woodson

So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off?
M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough. — Haruki Murakami

Maybe the God we see, the God who calls the daily shots, is merely a subGod. Maybe there's a God above this subGod who's busy for a few God minutes with something else, and will be right back; and when he gets back will take the subGod by the ear and say: Now look. Look at that fat man. What did he ever do to you? Wasn't he humble enough? Didn't he endure enough abuse for a thousand men? Weren't the simplest tasks hard? Didn't you sense him craving affection? Were you unaware that his days unraveled as one long bad dream? And maybe as the subGod slinks away, the true God will sweep me up in his arms, saying: My sincere apologies, a mistake has been made. Accept a new birth, as token of my esteem. — George Saunders

... if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it's a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you're thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be. — Tony Kushner

And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all: The last time I stand in a circle outside the band room in the shade of this oak tree that has protected generations of band geeks. The last time I eat pizza in the cafeteria with Ben. The last time I sit in this school scrawling an essay with a cramped hand into a blue boo. The last time I glance up at the clock. The last time I see Chuck Parson prowling the halls, his smile half a sneer. God. I was becoming nostalgic for Chuck Parson. Something sick was happening inside of me. — John Green

To whatever extent the Hell's Angels may or may be latent sadomasochists or repressed homosexuals is to me
after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists
almost entirely irrelevant. There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won't change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors ... but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best. — Hunter S. Thompson

This is, if not a lifetime process, it's awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, 'Huzzah! Eureka! I've got it!' and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn't work that way. It's a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it's hard. — Rod Serling

I want to drop to all fours and bay like a wild thing drunk on being hungry and strong, a beast that could fuck for days without cease if I could only find someone that could take it as hard and long a I can give it. — Karen Marie Moning

Every once in a while, I need a no-agenda day with nothing to do, but those aren't the days we're going to celebrate at the end of our lives. We won't even remember those days. What we'll remember are the days when we had everything to do, and with God's help, we did it. We won't remember the things that came easy; we'll remember the things that came hard. We'll remember the miracles on the far side of long and boring. — Mark Batterson

He kissed me again, farther up my neck, and I pushed him back against the wall.
My mind searched for the logical thought, a rational life raft before I drowned in wanting to hiss him. I managed, "We've only met a few days ago. We don't know each other."
Luke released me. "How long does it take to know someone?"
I didn't know. "A month? A few months?" It sounded stupid to quantify it, especially when I didn't want to believe my own reasoning. But I couldn't just go kissing someone I knew nothing about
it went against everything I'd ever been told. So why was it so hard to say no?
He took my fingers, playing with them in between his own. "I'll wait." He looked so good in the half-light under the trees, his light eyes nearly glowing against his shadowed skin. It was useless.
"I don't want you to." I whispered the words, and before I'd even finished saying them, his mouth was on mine and I was melting under his lips. — Maggie Stiefvater

Film work is hard work. It's long days, and quite often quite dismaying locations you have to be in. — Joanna Lumley

When Love and Life first meet, a radiant thing is born, without a shade. When the roads begin to roughen, when the shades begin to darken, when the days are hard, and the nights cold and long - then it begins to change. — Olive Schreiner

You intend to keep me confined in here with you for three days?" His voice was low and ominous.
"It doesn't have to take three days," she said, "It just depends how long it takes for you to come to your senses."
"My senses?" he shook her so hard she thought her teeth would rattle. "It is you whose mind is disordered if you think you can tame me like some pet! Is that what you think, Vesta? That you can somehow turn a man like me into your little lap dog?"
"No," she said, as earnest as she had ever been in her life. "I could never imagine you as a lap dog. Ever. You are a Mastiff. Big, powerful, dignified, brave, and yet gentle." She nodded with a look of self satisfaction. "Yes. Most definitely a Mastiff."
from THE VIRGIN HUNTRESS — Victoria Vane

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. — Herman Melville

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. — Paul Auster

In fifteenth-century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. Weddings, wakes, and other gatherings furnished additional opportunities for conviviality and carousing. Then there were the various local ceremonial occasions, such as the day honoring a village's patron saint or the anniversary of a church's founding ... So, despite the reputation of what are commonly called "the Middle Ages" as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen - at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed - as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labor. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week. — Bill Bryson

Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days ... What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure? ... Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds ... But failure ... ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough ... then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing ... There's always another secret. — Brandon Sanderson

I believe in marriage. I believe that two good people can be happy together for a lifetime. It's the only thing even close to a religion that I have, and I cling to it with almost messianic zeal. But it is a belief system that makes unreasonable demands on its adherents, all of us sacrificing to the bone for a reward that may or may not come at the end of our days; and all of us steadfastly refusing to see the mounting evidence that long-term happy marriages, if they exist at all, are pretty hard to come by. We all want to think that miracles are possible. Otherwise, marriage is just a lot of hard work. — Kate Hilton

Sometimes I feel alone. Some days are long and hard. But when I look out into this world, I am struck by the impossible beauty of it all. Those billions of magnificent accidents that led us to where we are today, that led us to paper planes and nautilus shells and the tiny, crooked smiles of children. When I think about the small perfections of the world, I have faith that my time will come. I have faith that someday, a warm light will flood over me and I will find peace. — Avery Monsen

The ways of living have been rendered vastly easier by a multitude of inventions, by the increasing wealth of the country, by better and more intelligent service; and yet life is by no means easier, but indeed hard. The demands on time, whether real or imagined, have increased in a greater ratio than the supply of facilities for answering them, and as the earth provokingly continues to revolve on its axis just as rapidly as of old, the days are never long enough for all the duties which they bring. — Anna Brackett

When I think back on the twenty years I spent in school, what sticks with me isn't any particular subject, learning tool, or classroom. It is the teachers who brought my education to life and drove my interest forward, so that my passion for learning continued, despite the long days, the hard chairs, the difficult problems. These women and men were giants. They were underpaid, and they put up with all sorts of crap, but they made me the person I am today vastly more than the facts they taught. That relationship is what digital education technology cannot ever replicate or replace, and why a great teacher will always provide a more innovative model for the future of education than the most sophisticated device, software, or platform. — David Sax

WORK, SOMETIMES
I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.
The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.
What are we sure of? Happiness isn't a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.
Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.
You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn't it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!
As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life. — Mary Oliver

Maybe I'll leave you hard and aching for days, months, years. That's how long I've been hard for you. Turn about's fair play, dontcha think, Paul Guy? (from Finding Eden Excerpt) — Kele Moon

At times, the road will be hard, the days will be long, and the journey you've traveled won't feel like a song. But know that I'll always love you, and with love, all is certain. — Laura Miller

House of Commons: 'You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.' Later this speech was generally cited as a classic example of determination and courage, but the reactions at the time were not all that enthusiastic. In his diary, Harold Nicolson noted: 'When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, when Churchill comes in the applause is less.' Many of the British, including King George VI and most of the Conservatives, considered Churchill in those days to be a warmonger and a dangerous adventurer. There was a strong undercurrent in favour of reaching an accord with Hitler. — Geert Mak

And I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that because the days are long, the road is hard, the trials are there and I never know when, I have this little gray cloud that's over my head, when it's gonna start raining on me again. And I do need everyone's prayers. But I also believe that we're here for a purpose, and Mitt is prepared. — Ann Romney

We are here on earth to work-to work long, hard, arduous hours, to work until our backs ache and our tired muscles knot, to work all our days. This mortal probation is one in which we are to eat our bread in the sweat of our faces until we return to the dust from whence we came. Work is the law of life; it is the ruling principle in the lives of the Saints. — Bruce R. McConkie

This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep your porch, go drink coffee in the shade of the trumpet vines. You have days where you want to lay down and die, but what you learn is this: As long as there's somebody left on this earth who loves you, it's reason enough to stay alive. You don't give in to your broke heart
you just let the wide, cracked space fill up again. — Michael Lee West

it often takes a long time for women to "get into" taking care of themselves, and that her need for autonomy was as much about basking in her hard-won self-actualization as it was a reaction to the exhaustion that comes with tending to a child's every need. These days, as I enter my forties, I find that I am only now beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin, to find the wherewithal to respect my own needs as much as others', to know what my emotional and physical limits are, and to confidently, yet kindly, tell others no. (No, I cannot perform that job; no, I cannot meet you for coffee; no, I cannot be in a relationship in which I feel starved for emotional and physical connection.) — Meghan Daum

Sang Ly, the desire to believe, to look forward to better days, to want them, to expect them-it seems to be ingrained in our being. Whether we like it or not, hope is written so deeply into our hearts that we just can't help ourselves, no matter how hard we try otherwise.we love the story because we are Sarann or Tattercoats or Cinderella. We all struggle with the same problems and doubts. We all long for the day when we'll get our own reward. We all harbor hope- — Camron Wright

How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favourite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them. You will waste days interpreting the simple banalities of a phone call; months staring at their soft lips as they talk; you will waste years watching a body sitting in a chair and willing every muscle to take you across the room and do a simple thing, say a simple word, make them love you and you will not do it; you will waste long nights wondering how they cannot feel this - the urge to embrace, the snow melt in the heart when you are near them - how they can sit in that chair, or speak with those lips, or make a call and mean nothing by it, hide nothing in their hearts. Or perhaps what they hide is not what you want to see. Because surely they love someone. It simply isn't you. — Andrew Sean Greer

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.

I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.

"You — Carol Ann Duffy

When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever for one moment, accepts it. Everybody knows that everybody dies. But not every day. Not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. (In the library, the Doctor walks back to the TARDIS. He stops, looking at the doors. Then he raises his hand, and stands there poised like that for a long moment. Finally he snaps his fingers. The doors open. He smiles slowly and walks in, joining Donna. Then he snaps his fingers again, and the doors close. River's voice continues over this.) Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call ... everybody lives. — Steven Moffat

In the long ago, in the gentle days, Brother Grumlow carved wood, worked with saw and chisel. When hard times come carpenters are apt to get nailed to crosses. Grumlow took up the knife and learned to carve men. He looks soft, my brother of the blade, slight in build, light in colour, weak chin, sad eyes, all of him drooping like the moustache that hangs off his lip. Yet he has fast hands and no fear of a sharp edge. Come against him with just a dagger for company and he will cut you a new opinion. — Mark Lawrence