Quotes About Ambition

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.

I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

I am made, crudely, for success.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.

I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.

Something in me wants more. I can't rest.

After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.

So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

Doesn't your work interest you, Esther? You know, Esther, you've got the perfect setup of a true neurotic. You'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that.

Maybe it's my ego. Maybe I crave someone who will never be my rival.

Read widely of others experiences in thought and action- stretch to others even though it hurts to and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance! Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way, the Spartan way- and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity!

to learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there's butter on it

Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.

I will be a little god in my small way.

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.

Ä°stediÄŸim bütün kitaplar? okuyamam, olmak istediÄŸim bütün insanlar olamam ve istediÄŸim hayatlar? süremem, istediÄŸim bütün becerileri edinemem. Öyleyse ne istiyorum?

After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

I would rather be a mediocre writer than a bad actress.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true