Quotes About Determination

was to shape them in her image: courageous, competitive, caring, and tireless.

This isn't fair, Dad," Jeb said. "This isn't fair to you." His father cut him off. "What are you talking about, fair?" Bush said. This was politics; this was real life. "Nobody owes us a damn thing. We're going to leave this city with our heads high and I don't want to hear that anymore." Bushes didn't whine. "Do your best and don't look back"—that was the code.

The magnitude of the job dwarfs every man who aspires to it," Johnson recalled in his memoirs. "Every man who occupies the position has to strain to the utmost of his ability to fill it.

We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.

under all conditions. There is little

Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.

The story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of strength, of Jefferson's adaptability and, most important, his determination to secure the territory from France, doubling the size of the country and transforming the United States into a continental power. A slower or less courageous politician might have bungled the acquisition; an overly idealistic one might have lost it by insisting on strict constitutional scruples. Jefferson, however, was neither

They can't shit on us," said Alex. "That's really what I'm saying. You can't shit on us anymore." There was a silence. "I just want them to stop shitting on us," said Alex. "OK," I said. "Sorry.

Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.

You know what they say: If at first you don't succeed, f**k it.

Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

Resolution One: I will live for God. Resolution Two: If no one else does, I still will.

She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she'd ever done.

He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry.

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

mental attitude is what mainly determines the quality of your life.

She was here to get rich and richer and then get out from under these men, not to accommodate mediocre mumbling coves. A man should be able to afford his own expulsions.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it.

It's true I didn't love the job, but I did want the money. If I was too incompetent for ordinary work, I would have to do something extraordinary or face destruction.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.