Quotes About Determination

They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

I don't make all the decisions, you know," Isabelle managed to say. "I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That's the secret, you know. That's the way you change your fate.

Sara had told me that a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be in need.

The aunts are so old it's impossible to tell their age. Their hair is white and their spines are crooked. They wear long black skirts and laced leather boots. Though they haven't left Massachusetts in more than forty years, they're certainly not intimidated by travel. Or anything else, for that matter. They know what they want and they're not afraid to be outspoken.

out from under the far side of the table

Alice Hoffman

life. She was only a girl and exhausted from her journey, but she would do as she must in order to survive.

We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice, we discovered we could fly. If you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky (p.397).

In every fairy tale the girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

and behind them came the women, and then the children with sticks and stones in their hands. There was a line of fury on the ground, slithering forth. Someone

You can tell just by looking at her that she never backed down or valued anyone's opinion above her own. She always believed that experience was not simply the best teacher, it was the only one

People who think you can't will certain things into being with the power of your pride are fools, plain as that.

108I was a rat perhaps, but never a mouse.

Trust no one, make your own future, love with all your heart.

want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense.

Without courage, you will never find the answer

A woman who acts as if she knows what she's doing gets what she wants.

It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was, like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes, but it is up to us to make it come.

The red velvet material was hard to work with, it pulled, and the style my mother had chosen was not easy either. She was not really a good sewer. She liked to make things; that is different. Whenever she could she tried to skip basting and pressing and she took no pride in the fine points of tailoring, the finishing of buttonholes and the overcasting of seams as, for instance, my aunt and my grandmother did.

Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion— calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body.

something make a man crawl over glass and fire to get to again after he get to it once

Black Bottom is walking tall, chin up, fist balled, brain firing on all cylinders. Black Bottom folk got steel in their spines, steel in their jaws, and steel in their will. But it wasn't always an attitude. Before it was razed, it was a place.

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.