Quotes About Determination

We should have pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will

The choice is ours, the choice is yours.

Yes, it's simple, really. If you're riding a bicycle and you don't want to fall off, you have to keep going - fast.

To challenge the right of investors to determine who lives, who dies, and how they live and die—that would be a significant move toward Enlightenment ideals (actually the classical liberal ideal). That would be revolutionary.

Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.

It's hopeless. I know that, but I never really get it. I go right on. I think to myself: I was wrong about the last one, but I'll try harder to be right about the next one.

If you don't want something, it's hard—in the movie business, especially.

And yet, anything real, anything strong, was never easy. She'd been taught from an early age that the things that mattered most were the hardest to obtain.

She was tough in the best sense of the word. She'd taken blows, the disappointments, and had worked her way through them. Some people, he knew, would have buckled under, found a clutch, or given up. But she had carved a place for herself and made it work.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

A woman who can threaten your life before breakfast is the only sort of woman worth having.

Marry me, Rebecca...You might as well say yes. I'll just talk you into it.

What was that technique you were using on those bastards? An ancient form called kicking ass.

I didn't get fired. You didn't punch your boss and get fired from the Tribune? That's what I heard. I punched what could loosely be called a colleague for cribbing my notes on a story and since the editor–who happened to be the asshole's uncle–took his word over mine, I quit. To write books. Is it fun? I guess it is. I bet you killed the asshole in the first one you wrote. You'd be right. Beat him to death with a shovel. Very satisfying.

You have to believe in it to get it...

It takes a lot of spine and stomach to make yourself into something when no one gives you a foundation.

Heroism's just doing more than you want to do or think you can. Sometimes it's just doing the crappy things, the unhappy things other people won't do....It's not just jumping out of a plane onto a glacier ten thousand feet up because there's nobody else there to do it. It's getting out of bed in the morning when it seems like too much trouble.

Courage comes in different forms. There's strength--that's the muscle. But love's the heart. When you put them together, you can do anything.

Niall: We're tossed by the winds of fate. Once we end where they blow us, we make of ourselves that we will.

The old goes into making us what we are, or what we're hell-bent on not being.

Give them your brains, girl, never your guts.

And still she felt more confident at the prospect of taking on the Russian Mafia than she did attending a backyard barbecue.

Look, if some guy dressed in his mother's clothes breaks in, fight him off until I get my pants back on.

She walked with a ghost of herself, one full of potential and possibility. One who was fearless. Where had that girl gone?