Quotes About Challenges

Each excuse let me learn about myself, let me discover entire worlds of surprising possibilities. Each one led me to more and more love.

There were plenty of other times when I was working too hard, dealing with people I didn't like, getting my creativity crushed over and over, and so on. When you are in those situations, you need to plot out your exit strategy.

One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.

It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.

You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.

So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.

The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.

But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

It is still not possible to overstate the price a negro pays to climb out of obscurity, for it is a particular price involved with being a negro, and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars endured in such a journey cannot be calculated. But even this is not the worst of it.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, 'and so you can stand less and less.

me. But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three—he is a little older than Fonny—he was already running out of familiar faces.

And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro "first" will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he'll be President of.

Not everything that is face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.