Quotes About Determination

I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.

And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it.

It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.

I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it.

We are in a rough situation—but, if you really want to think about it, ain't nothing new about that. That's just exactly, daughter, when you do not give up. You can't give up.

What do you think is going to happen? What we make happen, says Joseph—again, with resolution. That's easy to say, says Frank. Not if you mean it, says Joseph.

I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing!

p. 92) I know my robe's going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell.

Man, Fonny says, we just have to move it from day to day. If you think too much about it, you really are fucked, can't move at all.

As the years passed, she replied only: I'm going away from here. And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind.

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

Sometimes I think I'll just give up. But – how do you give up?

It is still not possible to overstate the price a negro pays to climb out of obscurity, for it is a particular price involved with being a negro, and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars endured in such a journey cannot be calculated. But even this is not the worst of it.

I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my place in this republic.

I'm going to pray God," said John—and his voice shook, whether with joy or grief he could not say—"to keep me, and make me strong ... to stand ... to stand against the enemy ... and against everything and everybody ... that wants to cut down my soul.

You've come full circle. Here you are again, with it all to do all over again, and you must decide all over again whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.

The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down

I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, from, and sideways. Shit-he weren't going to beat my ass, then. And if he tried to kill me. I'd take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.

There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard — the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down - that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day - it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so.

What you think is going to happen?" "What we make happen," says Joseph—again, with resolution.

To act is to commit, and to commit is to take risks.

The saints of God were together and very conscious this morning of their being together and of their sainthood; and were determined that the less enlightened world should know who they were and remark upon it.

Je n'étais pas boxeur, je n'étais pas beau, je n'étais pas chanteur, je n'étais pas danseur j'étais drôlement coincé la seul chose que j'ai pensé est que peut-être je pouvais être écrivain