Quotes About Ambition

You want to fly in jets, and I just want to fly" -Baby Carlyle

Celeste Bradley

It bothers you, doesn't it?" Mia said suddenly. "I think you can't imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you've got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you'd choose.

To those out on their own paths, setting little fires.

Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible. In

Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she'd been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she'd planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn't remember how to write a paper, how

At least I know who I am. What I want,

It's hard not to think and hope that your children might achieve great things—and to believe that they can accomplish anything if you only give them a boost along the way. But it's also hard to know when you're helping and supporting, and when you've crossed the line into pushing. And it's so easy to fall into the mindset of "I'm doing it for your own good.

Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway.

All weekend he'd wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall. The purposeful stride he saw in everyone's walk, as if they knew they were destined for greatness.

Everything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze. She could not remember now why she thought it had all been possible.

She buried her nose in Lydia's hair and made silent promises. Never to tell her to sit up straight, to find a husband, to keep a house. Never to suggest that there were jobs or lives or worlds not meant for her; never to let her hear doctor and think only man. To encourage her, for the rest of her life, to do more than her mother had. "All

the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright. Late nights

The Good Life in Shaker Heights," Cosmopolitan, March 1963

She's some kind of artist," Mrs. Richardson had said, and when Mr. Richardson asked what kind, she answered jokingly, "A struggling one.

All her life she had heard her mother's heart Drumming one beat: doctor, doctor, doctor. She wanted this so much, Lydia knew, that she no longer needed to say it. It was always there. Lydia could not imagine another future, another life. It was like trying to imagine a world where the sun went around the moon, or where there was no such thing as air.

Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.

She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.

Quello era tutto il mio passato, insopportabile eppure così diverso, così morto. M'ero detta tante volte in quegli anni - e poi più avanti, ripensandoci - che lo scopo della mia vita era proprio di riuscire, di diventare qualcuna, per tornare un giorno in quelle viuzze dov'ero stata bambina e godermi il calore, lo stupore, l'ammirazione di quei visi familiari, di quella piccola gente. E c'ero riuscita, tornavo; e le facce la priccola gente eran tutti scomparsi.

a big company makes a wonderful place to go and semiretire for a while if you're burned out. But if you're striving to be remarkable (which you are!), a big company is a hard place to get into the right groove in the same way that a bakery is a bad place to go to try to work off your love handles. The solution? Go independent!

Set your sights higher. Don't think of yourself as a programmer at a specific company—after all, it's not likely that you'll be at the same place forever—but as a participating member of an industry. You are a craftsperson or an artist. You have something to share beyond the expense-reporting application you're developing for your human resources department or the bugs you've got stacked up in your company's issue-tracking system.