Do not run toward pain, but do not run from it, either. Pain is your guide. Pain is what guides a person in every serious undertaking. Unless an aching longing and passion arises in someone to get or achieve something, he will never get or achieve it.
—Andrew Harvey
Making weapons is what we know how to do best, the supreme achievement of late-twentieth-century American civilization. To this blessed work we assign our finest intellect and the largest share of our treasure, and in the magnificence of an aircraft carrier or a cruise missile we find our moral and aesthetic equivalent of the Sistine ceiling and Chartres Cathedral.
—Lewis Lapham
If you don't try at anything, you can't fail. It takes back bone to lead the life you want.
—Richard Yates in Revolutionary Road
I just don't know why they're shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American Dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back.
—Alan Alda as Hawkeye on M*A*S*H
Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
—Jack London in White Fang
All great achievements require time.
—Maya Angelou
How my achievements mock me!
—William Shakespeare
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself.… Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
—Mark Twain
Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. Give everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others. Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.
—Norman Vincent Peale
Kites rise highest against the wind—not with it.
—Winston Churchill
There's no sense of satisfaction in something you didn't do anything to achieve.
—Mia Sheridan in Becoming Calder