Quotes About Challenges

He admired her for throwing off her aristocratic shackles -- his terms, that -- and making her own way in the world. He didn't realize that the truth was so much more complex, so much less impressive. She had less thrown than been thrown.

Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they're really not. They're companions - the hero and the sidekick.

Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.

King Boris is going to meet us with his train, which he actually drives himself. What hard times some of these little kings have fallen upon.

I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

Everybody told me to be a man. Nobody told me how.

I make it through the first two weeks of school without a nuclear meltdown.

They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

I doubt trees are ever told to 'be the screwed-up ninth-grader.'

They said I had to get fatter. I told them my goal was 080.00 and if they wanted my respect, they'd better stop lying to me. When my brain started working again, I checked their math. Someone had made a mistake because they didn't figure in the snakes in my head and the thick shadows hiding inside the cage of my ribs.

Too many grown ups tell kids to follow their dreams, like that's going to get them somewhere. Auntie Laurie says follow your nightmares instead. Because when you figure out what's eating you alive, you can slay it.

Ninth grade is a minor inconvenience to him. A zit-cream commercial before the Feature Film of Life.

Hairwoman is torturing us with essays. Do English teachers spend their vacations dreaming up these things?

Gracie's father was an engineer, her mother an accountant. I couldn't picture either one of them yelling or throwing things or having affairs. I could see my dad doing stuff like that. Trish sure did. But Dad carried a war in his skull, and Trish was a drunk. Gracie's parents didn't have anything like that to deal with, but their daughter was falling apart on the bathroom floor.

Precalculus was taught in dog whistle, a pitch too high to hear.

HOW CHEQUERED IS HUMAN LIFE! HOW PRECARIOUS IS HAPPINESS! HOW EASILY DO WE OFTEN PART WITH IT FOR A SHADOW! THESE ARE THE REFLECTIONS THAT FREQUENTLY INTRUDE THEMSELVES UPON ME, WITH A PAINFUL APPLICATION. I AM GOING TO DO MY DUTY. –LETTER FROM COLONEL ALEXANDER HAMILTON TO HIS WIFE, ELIZABETH

Things in my environment had gotten a little bit out of my control, as things sometimes do. I mean, we can't control every little facet of our world all of the time...

Because we are superwomen. Because it's how we are. We're high, we're sleep deprived, and we're still doing all the shit. If my husband doesn't get his full eight hours, he'll mention it the whole next day, as if he spent the dark time keeping flesh-eating zombies from gaining entry to our house. Not middle-aged women. They get up from a bed they've never slept in, put on an underwire and some mascara, and do it all over again. And no one knows.

Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one's daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage.

Your unconscious mind takes the things you can't handle and plays with them while you sleep until some of the sharp corners are worn off.

Life, I announced, is not a B picture. Well, it ain't no De Mille epic either, boss. Things'll work out, Bernie.

The world's a bastard. Life just happens to people.

Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag.

Sad times May follow your tracks, Bad times May bar you from Saks, Add times When Satan in slacks Breaks down your self control.