Quotes About Determination

Crystal didn't like delays. She was a fast-moving, efficient person, and when her way was blocked, she became very tense and spoke with her lips in two hard lines.

She looked powerful, Lina thought, even though she was very short.

Please just let us choose and get it over with.

Whoever coined the phrase 'a man's got to play the hand that was dealt him' was most certainly one piss-poor bluffer.

You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.

It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.

It (the sun) didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

She never felt sorry for herself, and that was something I decided I admired most in people.

Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. I never knew a girl to have such gumption, she'd say. But I'm not too sure it's a good thing.

Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.

She knew how to get by on next to nothing.

Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito.

We're becoming a nation of sissies.

Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I'd be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom's, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some

Just remember," Mom said after examining the blisters, "what doesn't kill you will make you stronger." "If that was true, I'd be Hercules by now," Lori said.

You know, if it's humanly possible, I'll get it for you. And if it ain't humanly possible, I'l die trying.

She kept saying that the flood was God's will and we had to submit to it. But I didn't see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail—the gumption to try to save ourselves—isn't that what he wanted us to do?

You busted your snot locker pretty good.

For a while I considered dropping out of Barnard to help. It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets. But Lori convinced me that dropping out was a lamebrained idea. It wouldn't do any good

My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.

Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls

months pregnant. Dad, who had fixed

You know, if it's humanly possible, I'll get it for you. And if it ain't humanly possible, I'll die trying.