It's hard to win a tug-of-war with yourself.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch found a length of blue string behind the hardware store this morning and spent an hour pulling it out of a crack in the sidewalk. The far end was pinched under the concrete and would not come, so he braced his back feet and hauled, and when it gave an inch he fell over backward, and then he hauled again. I watched from the gutter and thought about how often I have done the same with a sentence, pulling one way in the morning and the other way at noon, calling the whole business work. It's hard to win a tug-of-war with yourself. For years I believed the strain was the proof of effort, that a thing which came easy had not been earned. Switch got the string out in the end. He left it in the street and went to look at a dropped cracker.