Quotes About Challenges

What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows.

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're

Eleanor and Franklin had had six children together, but apparently Eleanor had once described sex with her husband as "an ordeal to be borne".

Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder.    The

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

It's enraging, recalling a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times in my life a man telling me to relax, be a team player, stop worrying so much, take it easy and roll with the punches. We're all on the same team.

There are many opportunities in a life. It's not a failing to take whatever comes one's way. In fact, I rather think it a strength.

He wished he knew how they did it. Even planning for the next day was beyond his capabilities. He didn't understand how to think that way, how to plan, and he wanted to. He wanted to understand how people mapped out their lives, how they went so easily through a day. How they managed to keep from destroying the people around them, destroying themselves. He looked down at his arm, at the too-smooth stump, the thick pink ridge of scar. Christ, how did they do it? How did Genie do it?

he'd rather get shot than navigate all these...feelings.

To be outspoken, or different at all, is a problem for women.

It was not a happy ending of the sort in fairy tales, but it was the only one we had.

I'm not sure a man can ever understand the complicated matter of feminine relationships.

Perfection is too high a goal to strive for. Sometimes working hard brings more satisfaction in the end. We appreciate what we've almost lost more than what we've never doubted.

But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these "show[ed] by their unformed features and mechanical movements" the ill effects of having been "treated by wholesale"; they were not accorded the respect that engenders "self-respect.

Shit happens and its awful but its okay. We deal with it because we havet to.

It's not my fault that these are the problems I've been put on this earth to deal with, right? They're petty, they piss me off, and they're all mine

Life - such as it is - always seems to get in the way

No ride. So I couldn't go home. No plan. No boyfriend. No job.

You gotta take chances in this life or you're already dead.

Bad things can happen to anyone at any time, whether you follow the rules or not.

Stink thought he knew everything now that he was starting second grade.

I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me. Raising children is one of many life experiences I'm happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump. If I could get through life without experiencing death, I would gladly do that, too.

Parents need to somehow justify the lives of sputum, tuition, and sarcastic abuse to which they've condemned themselves, and so make their own grandiose claims about parenthood's ineffable fulfillments and beneficent effects—that one cannot possibly know what real love is unless you've had children, that it is life's ultimate purpose, et cetera.