Addie Johnson is an actor who helps run Rising Phoenix Rep, a small developmental theatre company. She's also an editor and author of several books including Lemons to Lemonade: Little Ways to Sweeten Up Life's Sour Moments and A Little Book of Thank Yous: Letters, Notes, and Quotes. In this brightly colored little volume, Johnson takes a hard look at the art of perseverance which is an amalgamation of hard work, discipline, commitment, and responsibility. She calls it "stick-to-it-Iveness."
Among the lively examples of this virtue presented are: the polar expedition of Earnest Shackleton; the detail work of photographer Irving Penn; the courage and patience of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues; participants in the Iditarod, "the last great race on earth" in Alaska's snow; the discipline of Helen Keller, author and world lecturer; the penguin parents who withstand the wind, cold, and storms of Antarctica; the welwitschia mirabilis plant of South West Africa which can live for up to 2,000 years in the middle of the desert; the Civil Rights Movement spearheaded by a day-by-day struggle against violence and hatred of white racists; and the 3,000-mile migration of monarch butterflies.
As usual, Johnson provides a sprightly and varied collection of quotations: here is a brief sampler:
• "Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
• "Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."
— George Eliot
• "Everything that is not given is lost."
— Indian proverb
• "When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for it is just the place and time that the tide will turn."
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
• "By perseverance the snail reached the ark."
— Charles Spurgeon
