Quotes About Success

You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.

And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

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

She saw, briefly, the way the world rarely stopped to salute you or admonish you, regardless of what you had or had not accomplished.

A high school play was a time of high emotion and meaning; if you were in a play, you felt as if the play mattered. The success or failure of any production seemed like a real reflection on you personally.

And didn't it always go like that - body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

There's only a handful of women who get anywhere. Short story writers, mostly, as if maybe women are somehow more acceptable in miniature.

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

I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

Sometimes you have to take your time to get your reward.

What I envy most about you and everyone else heading back to school is the certainty of it all. You've got a prescribed set of requirements to guide you through the next few years. Focus your energy on the completion of those assignments and you'll succeed. Guaranteed. Where's my syllabus to guide me through life?

Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master's is the new bachelor's, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your first-grade spelling test.

YOU'RE GONNA GET BUMPED BY THE BEST MAN BRAND IN THE BUSINESS.

Play like you're in first, train like you're in second,

An arrow is never afraid of shooting from the bow; but it is afraid of not reaching the target!

Attack work! Even the toughest work will start running away! Attack the difficulties! This is the Golden Rule of every kind of victory.

Birds teach us something very important: To whatever height you rise, you will finally come down to the ground!

Both half success and half failure must be considered as a full failure!

By the time the clever reaches the clouds, the genius is already on the stars.

Climb the ladder only if it takes you to somewhere high! Some ascents may descend you to low places!