On Patience

So I've been having my own private Vonnegut festival this past week, and as it comes to a close, I offer you this paragraph from Palm Sunday, with which I don't entirely agree, and which both heartens and discourages me:

"I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time."

And further on patience, I offer this pseudo-quote from the fictional Daphne Kaplan as reported in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves:

"Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."