Quotes About Challenge

Easier isn't always best.

My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.

If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.

Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of Bam (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with butyric - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see.

Barbara Ehrenreich

What do you do when confronted with an inexplicable and alarming situation? Well, you can panic or give in to some other tyrannical emotion, like dread. Or you can escape into a book or a puzzle or, judging from the adults around me, a bottle of gin. But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.

No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

Le voy a decir algo que no le va a gustar: una crisis no es una oportunidad".

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

That was the trouble with war, the Hawk thought detachedly:

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it.

At the time, I thought my life couldn't get any worse. Here's some advice: Don't ever think that.

She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on.

At lunch break [from cheesemaking] I checked out the wildly colorful powder room, where a quote from Alice in Wonderland was painted on the wall: There's no use in trying,' Alice said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.

Crisis is opportunity.

The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that's just the deal.

We drove around with "Proud Tobacco Farmer" stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.

This is all going to scare us to death," she said. "You and me. But we're still going to have to do it.

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it

We've got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.

Lily picked up her spoon and dipped into Rock Bottom Farm's maple ice cream. We could hear the crash of corporate collapse with every bite. Tough work, but somebody's got to do it.

Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?