Quotes About Challenges

The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?

The women I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out. They got that way because shit went wrong and they handled it. They handled it a thousand different ways on a thousand different days, but they handled it. Those women are my superheroes.

It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.

The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it.

I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I'm aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.

Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in - predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.

Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place.

Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding.

And I do want to assure you: I'm aware that many things were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.

Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you

C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, "We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.

All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together over long years get to know one another's failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.

I'm aware that many things were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.

someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.

En mi destino hay muchas cosas que se me escapan, pero hay otras que sí están bajo mi jurisdicción. Hay una serie de billetes de lotería que puedo comprar, aumentando mis posibilidades de llegar a ser feliz.

The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, the don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think.

A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live? I was a bird who could dive and Felipe was a fish who can fly, we basically lived in midair. Diving and flying across oceans and continents in order to be together.

If you don't have a clear passion and somebody blithely tells you to go follow your passion, I think you have the right to give that person the middle finger. Because that's like somebody telling you that all you need in order to lose weight is to be thin, or all you need in order to have a great sex life is to be multiorgasmic: That doesn't help!

They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton Detectives, and they flank me—Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right.

As my friend Pastor Rob Bell warns: "Don't rush through the experiences and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you." Don't let go of your courage the moment things stop being easy or rewarding. Because that moment? That's the moment when interesting begins.

How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren't going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.