This is from Cynthia Newberry Martin’s wonderful series 365 True Things
… as John Ashbery says, The reasons that religions are great is that they are founded on doubt. So you have to be the religion of yourself, which surely Walt Whitman said somewhere, (…) In my experience, the people who become writers are the ones who keep writing through the yards of silence and the years of discouragement.
sub rosa 
Sigrun, I love these quotes paired with your amazing photo. That phrase “yards of silence” is so visual and powerful. I appreciate the mention.
My pleasure!
Such an evocative picture…it and the quote express the exact feelings experienced when I worked on a thesis that I thought would never end! It did eventually 🙂 At the time I found solace in the meandering Scaruffi:
‘We pause, after the winding ride,
visitors to a habitat of primeval darkness,
to a maze of existential hairpins.
We change the (visible) subject again,
our silence rhyming with our innocence,
sitting on the steps of the observatory
like pilgrims praying in the original shrine.
En route.
Nothing is exactly the way we do it.’