Quotes About Challenges

I would be the first to admit that my maternal instincts are not well developed--though in defense I must add that the raising of Ramses would have discouraged any woman.

Men are frightful nuisances at times; how much simpler life would be if we women did not have to make allowances for their little peculiarities.

This one-two punch—flat incomes and rising expenses—has hit the middle class squarely in the gut. Beginning

America's middle class was under attack.

I'm happy that the GDP is up and unemployment is down. Yay! But I'm not drinking champagne. In fact, I'm hitting alarm buttons everywhere I can. Our once-solid middle class is in mortal danger—in danger and running out of time. Every one of those happy numbers is used by nearly every economic reporter and pundit and politician, but those numbers paper over the fact that America's middle class is literally disappearing. NO

What happened is an economic boa constrictor that is squeezing working families so hard they can't breathe. Gina

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

Bitch: In praise of difficult women.

It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn't seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I'm just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

You don't need an excuse to be depressed.

Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer.

No man is going to solve my problems, no one can rescue me, because I am too sick.

It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.

If only life could be more like the movies, where characters muddle through things and do what's right in the end. But real life isn't like that.

It really wasn't fair. Why did guys have to be such jerks?

You know how it is when someone wants to complain; all the good counsel in the world is nothing to one drop of their precious misery, and everything you suggest is somehow impossible.

The child who lives with autism may look "normal," but his behavior can be perplexing and downright unruly.

Cognitive and social learning cannot break through to a child whose world is intrusively loud, blindingly bright, unbearably malodorous and physically complicated to navigate.

Debugging: what an odd word. As if bugging were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.

Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.

Shackleton came to the conclusion that instead of sailing to Leith Harbor

In appearance, the Endurance was beautiful by any standards.

in the three-quarters of a century that men had been coming to South Georgia