Quotes About Ambition

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary.

the Iraq war was the Ishtar of wars.

Or maybe they don't even want babies, some of these women, and life opens out to them in an endless field of work. And once in a while the world responds in a big way, letting them in, giving them a key, a crown. It does happen, it does. But usually it doesn't.

Being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, it's unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow.

Parents were the ones who handed you law school admission test study guides unprompted, and when you responded with revulsion or rage, they defensively said, "But I just wanted you to have something to fall back on.

To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.

Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance.

The world of law was filled with the fallen, but theater wasn't. No one ever "fell back" onto theater. You had to really, really want it.

Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet.

And you should try to do what you want. We should all try to do whatever we want in life. I mean, what is the point otherwise?

He crashed quietly through the world.

The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership—leadership being something that everyone now wanted, as if the world could be made up entirely of leaders and no followers, the way children might crave an all-fireman, all-ballerina society.

How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself

Bone didn't know yet that the men who own the world don't get to do that by being magnanimous and overly interested in other people. They get to do it by taking care of themselves along the way. They stoke the fire of their own reputations, and sometimes other people come by, asking: What's that you're doing there? Oh, stoking the fire of my reputation. Can I help? Certainly. Go get some wood.

all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary

Unlike almost everyone he knew at college, Jonah was not particularly ambitious. When people inquired about his ambitions, he told them that his mother's non-acquisitive folksinger's values must have rubbed off on him, because he didn't feel the need to have his life figured out. But the truth was that he didn't want to deal with it.

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.

My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.

you will have to fight your entire life. And that's why you'll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.

I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings—of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop.

Whenever I doubted myself, my dad would say, 'Grab that dream by the hands, Gwennie. Clutch until the knuckles go white.'" "Whose dream?" "It doesn't matter whose dream it is," she said. "Just that it's a dream.

You never think your life will be that big.    Just

Remember this," she says, glowing, her skin golden and life-marked, "you will have to fight your entire life. And that's why you'll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.