Quotes About Challenges

Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.

from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough.

every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?

Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.

It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap. I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

Marriages tended to harden like arteries..

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

So that was me promising Emmy that life is to be trusted. I knew better. I should have let her go with her gut: Never get back on the horse, because it's going to throw you every damn chance it gets.

LISTEN, don't believe in fairy tales! After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince, you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side.

Weeds are job security for the gardener.

You had to be careful with large families.

but in better days she was always one to tell me I should start trusting the wild ride, meaning life or whatever. Because it's not one hundred percent fucked up, once in a while it delivers.

These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.

That's just old people shit," I told her. "The cost of doing business with them. They've got their rock-hard stools and dried-up old poon, what else are they going to wave in your face? They press the know-it-all thing as their sole advantage.

A wife had greater wants, naturally, and could do nothing to help her own situation.

Sometimes the darkest challenges, the most difficult lessons, hold the greates gems of light.

Today's national movements, women's and blacks', seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.

But given the many shapes and forms the back door could take, she was pretty sure he'd already been through a couple of them, whether he knew it or not. Was it even possible to grow up a poor black man in America and avoid the back door?

Is there any teacher better, more patient, more determined than fate?

And divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment with the equivalent of chemotherapy, what did that say about the others? How many of the nondivorced had just learned to live with the illness because the cure seemed even worse than the disease?

A survivor reassesses odds continually and doesn't disrespect them.

Some people just need a routine, and refuse to accept the consequences of predictability. In my experience, these people tend to get culled, often sooner, sometimes later. It's a Darwinian world out there.