Quotes About Ambition

Why bother trying? What was the point? So I could go to some suck-ass college, get a diploma, march out into a job that I hated, marry a pretty girl who would want to divorce me, but then she wouldn't because we'd have kids, so instead she'd be the angry woman at the other end of the kitchen table, and the kids would grow up watching this, until one day I'd look at my son and he'd look just like that face in the bathroom mirror? If that was life, then it was twisted.

The light beyond my eyes flashflashflashes with a hundred futures for me. Doctor. Ship's captain. Forest ranger. Librarian. Beloved of that man or that women or those children or those people who voted for me or who painted my picture. Poet. Acrobat. Engineer. Friend. Guardian. Avenging whirlwind. A million futures--not all pretty, not all long, but all of them mine. I do have a choice - p. 271

be aggressive, BE-BE Aggressive! B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E

I don't know what I'm doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I'll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I'll think about a career path.

Maybe I'll be an artist if I grow up.

When I was a real girl, my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She'd brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy.

Maybe I'll be an artist if I grow up.

That's such bullshit, Mythology repeated by parents because it lets them force their kids into sports and push them too hard by pretending that in the end it will pay off with the holy scholarship. You know how many kids get a free ride? Hardly any. Like, maybe fourteen.' -Finn (165)

Be honest with yourself; set the alarm for the time the Real You will get up, not the Ambitious You, because the Ambitious You doesn't really exist.

When ambitious men overcome a dynasty and seize power, they inevitably adopt most of the ways of their predecessors. —THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN

No, the path of God has often been diverted to lead to a human desire, the word of God twisted to suit human ambition. Were

Every so often, one encounters a woman of her type who reaches past the distractions of position, pleasure, and society's assumptions to become something greater. And even more rarely, one finds a woman who craves not power, but the chance to create something new.

And was there anything on earth as dangerous as getting everything you ever wanted? As

First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do - then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it.

if you intend to try and work, not to sit under the Tree of Idleness.

We are more unhappy to see people ahead of us than happy to see people behind us.

I probably never would have been hired on Broadway had I not moved out to LA and pursued acting and film, which is sad really.

Nothing big ever came from being small.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

I remember the first check I got for 'The Office,' and it made me feel sad. It ruined it. ... Because there was sort of a nobility in poverty.

It is admirable to die the victim of one's faith; it is sad to die the dupe of one's ambition.

I'm not too afraid of much but I do fear not being able to race some day. I can imagine it would be quite sad.

I just didn't want to be a loser anymore...-Mitsuko Souma

The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.