Quotes About Dedication

The world is glutted with magnificent three-page starts, and the road to hell is paved with unfinished manuscripts.

All of the valuable writing I have done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I wanted to leave the room.

The four to six young aides usually slept in one room, often two to a bed, then worked long days in a single room with chairs crowded around small wooden tables. Washington typically kept a small office off to the side. During busy periods, the aides sometimes wrote and copied one hundred letters per day, an exhausting grind

The young man who had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with his superiors in the British Army was suddenly breathing fire. Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total.

He constantly reminded his son that it was easier to launch a charitable commitment than to end it.

Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith.

Gates met with Harper and urged him to shed his outside activities.

He was not a man to abandon a project that had received his blessing.

Perhaps most problematic was the controversial bargain that Alexander Hamilton had struck with the Constitution, dedicating his life to what he deemed a flawed document.

One could now see in his face the subdued melancholy of a man who had sacrificed too much for work.

Wanting to dedicate himself to philanthropy

As part of this studious approach, he recorded all his golf scores in thick little books, with names, dates, and places included.

As I began my life as a bookkeeper, I learned to have great respect for figures and facts, no matter how small they were.… I had a passion for detail which afterward I was forced to strive to modify.

I'm doing this in love.

While here, Grant goes out to the very front, is under fire for hours together, and at the same time he receives despatches from Sherman a thousand miles away, and directs the movements of his army at Atlanta, of another in Louisiana, of the forces at Mobile; and smokes his cigar in calm and quiet all the while," he informed Edwin Booth.

thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing

I've defined myself, privately and publicly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practices five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible. Weekends were either spent training or competing. I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast...

I think of the limitations that specialness requires: doing a series of very unspecial things, very well, over and over (...) (P223)

No jokes, no banter. No pre-mission

don't know why he's there, but I promise you he's clean, and he's going to do what needs doing, or he's going to die trying.

The unit had organized itself like a small-market baseball team enjoying an unlikely pennant run: talented journeymen working together, no stars, no egos, mutually supportive, and above all ruthlessly and relentlessly effective.

We don't have a Plan B.

Books by Lee Child Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction

I have spent my entire career trying to please the reader; I'm not a master, I'm the servant.