Quotes About Challenge

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Passion out of passion's obstacles.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

We gamble with the thought of winning. But it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing that's irresistible.

Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.

Should be great. But when have things ever worked out great? In the human dream?

The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart's desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls.

We live as best we may in a world of worms.

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much.

Whites find it harder to believe in something to believe in.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.

L'adversité sans doute est un grand maître, mais il fait payer cher ses leçons, et souvent le profit qu'on en retire ne vaut pas le prix qu'elles ont coûté.

on peut acquérir la liberté; mais on ne la recouvre jamais

If you are willing to do only what's easy, life will be hard. But if you're willing to do what's hard, life will be easy.

Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't.

From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

We're becoming a nation of sissies.

She kept saying that the flood was God's will and we had to submit to it. But I didn't see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail—the gumption to try to save ourselves—isn't that what he wanted us to do?

Unfortunately, theory don't always carry the day.

Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.