Quotes About Adversity

As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don't realize it, then you're finished.

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard

Nobody can save you but yourself. You will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. They will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise, and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. But don't, don't, don't. It's a war not easily won, but if anything is worth winning then this is it. Nobody can save you but yourself, and you're worth saving.

sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

When I went to the Yellow Cab Company I passed the Cancer Building and I remembered that there were worse things than looking for a job you didn't want.

the nights you fight best are when all the weapons are pointed at you, when all the voices hurl their insults while the dream is being strangled. the nights you fight best are when the game is fixed, when the crowd screams for your blood.

Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I've got several degrees. Call me Mr.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us

My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.

well, we all have our sharks, I'm sure, and there's only one way to get them off before they hack and nibble you to death— stop feeding them; they will find other bait; you fattened them the last dozen times around— now set them out to sea.

mainly thinking, well, I'm still alive and have the ability to expel wastes from my body and poems. and as long as that's happening I have the ability to handle betrayal loneliness hangnail clap and the economic reports in the financial section.

You look down in the mouth. You all right?" "Lost a woman." "You'll have others and lose them too.

How much shit does a man have to take just to stay alive?" "Plenty," came the answer, "and more …

There are too many ways to drown even if you don't want to drown.

I was the only one without. you could hit bottom and then find another bottom. balls.

I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios . . . We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.

greater men than I have failed to agree with Life.

my greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.

I get the blues for him, for me, for all of us: for want of something to do we keep slaying our small dragons as the big one waits.

Most so-called brave people lack imagination. As though they can't conceive of what would happen if something went wrong. The truly brave overcome their imagination and do what they have to do.

There are still things to be handle; there will always be things to be handled. Nobody ever gets caught up and finished on what there is to do. And even if you do, for a moment, feel a central peace, there is always somebody walking behind you with a switchblade.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail.

The tigers have found me, and I do not care.

But trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job.