Quotes About Determination

When she marched—Miss Trunchbull never walked, she always marched like a storm-trooper with long strides and arms aswinging—when she marched along a corridor you could actually hear her snorting as she went, and if a group of children happened to be in her path, she ploughed right on through them like a tank, with small people bouncing off her to left and right.

You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have started!

She seemed to know that neither crying nor sulking ever got anyone anywhere. The only sensible thing to do when you're attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter-attack.

Never do anything by halves if you wanna get away with it.

It's got to be done.

Pero a mí me pareció que había algo raro en su forma de hablar y en su aburrimiento: una sombra malévola en su ceño, y en su actitud una determinación que me produjo cierto desasosiego al mirarle

perfectly calm. "We'll soon get rid of

made a decision. She decided that every time her father or her mother was beastly to her, she would get her own back in some way or another. A small victory or two would help her to tolerate their idiocies and would stop her from going crazy. You must remember that she was still hardly five years old and it is not easy for somebody as small as that to score points against an all-powerful grown-up. Even so, she was determined to have a go. Her father, after what had

Here I come, you grizzly old grunion! You rotten old turnip! You filthy old frumpet!

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, Just as long as he finishes the book.

When we don't throw ourselves completely into it and we hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future.

The actor Mark Ruffalo went to six hundred auditions before he got his first break. Six hundred NOs before the first YES.

Find me one person who's doing something interesting in the world who hasn't felt the hot sting of a NO.

Find me one person who's doing something interesting in the world who hasn't felt the hot sting of a NO. Or a door slammed in the face. Or boos. Or a rejection letter. Or a tepid reception. Or bankruptcy. Or gotten fired.

To do anything new—to do the 1—requires tremendous mental fortitude to not think about 2 or 3 yet. That time will come. And it is not now. Now is the time for 1. You start with 1. And you work on that. Just 1. And when 1 is done, you move to 2.

You always have a choice, she spat. You fight until you see you're beaten, and then you keep on fighting.

To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he "thought" he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, "What the fuck good is thinking to me? Thinking isn't good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to know!" Often, he didn't know.

Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: It would kill him if he relaxed.

In every election in which he ran—not only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.

and he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. "He used to say, 'I want only can do people.' That was one of his favorite expressions. 'I only want can do people around. I don't want anybody who tells me that they can't do something.' 

Robert A. Caro

twenty-three-old

Robert A. Caro

that quality in me. And I know it wasn't only logic that made me think: I'm never going to write about a crucial election, a pivotal moment in my subject's life, and say that no one's ever going to know if it was really stolen or not until I've done everything I can think of to find out if it was stolen or not.