Quotes About Determination

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

A woman of her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can't use her? we're down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she's going to roll over and die?

She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she'd be ready for anything the next morning.

Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn't mind skipping the author's philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself.

It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul.

was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.

The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end. Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated. That is the difference between the Germans and the Japanese. That is what we are up against in fighting Japan.

It took Drake more than a year to find someone to drill his well. One salt-well driller after another refused him or failed to appear when promised. His standards were high.

a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I've had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I've lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It's in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

Across the next two years, they drilled one disappointing hole after another.

Then, just in time, as in all good melodramas, Dammam No. 7 came through: on 4 March 1938, while the Socal board was still deliberating, No. 7, at a depth of 4,725 feet, started flowing at 1,585 barrels a day. Three days later, the flow was up to more than twice that volume, to 3,690 barrels, and to 3,810 barrels by the end of the month.

Allison began broadcasting the countdown. Richard Feynman, a future Nobel laureate who had entered physics as an adolescent via radio tinkering, tinkered the radio to life. Men began moving into position. "We were told to lie down on the sand," Teller protests, "turn our faces away from the blast, and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.

Teller prepared himself further at Compañia Hill: "I put on a pair of dark glasses. I pulled on a pair of heavy gloves. With both hands I pressed the welder's glass to my face, making sure no stray light could penetrate around it. I then looked straight at the aim point.

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. "My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about," says Bethe, "and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this.

It] means they will continue the war until every man—perhaps every woman and child—lies face downward on the battlefield. Thousands of Japanese, maybe hundreds of thousands, accept it literally. To ignore this suicide complex would be as dangerous as our pre-war oversight of Japanese determination and cunning which made Pearl Harbor possible.

start working- rarely resting- seemingly driven by a fatalistic sense that work that has to be done was best done as quickly as possible.

She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

people confuse power with will because so few of them have the foggiest idea what they want. Absent any knowledge, will remains impotent. A limp dick, as it were." She regarded him, eyebrow arched. "The lucky few who happen actually to know what they want are said to have will-power.

people are forever confusing will with power