Quotes About Challenges

I asked Vince how his business was going. Not well, he said.

What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not?

Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off—or even alive.

When Glenda Jackson reveals that she has never been in a relationship with a man in which he hasn't raised his fists to her, I don't know whether this tells us more about the contemporary male or about Glenda Jackson.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be.

Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange.

Being out of work brought a lot of new and starkly instructive experiences.

Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of "Nobody will know the difference." But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.

To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.

Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.

He was raised without a proper diagnosis.

Never work with children, puppies or bulimics

It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child. It's that the things even a nitwit could do with little or no instruction often confused me.

So if you're a straight-A student in school or a metaphorical straight-A student in your adult life, that's a whole lot of the same old, same old. One A+ paper blends right into the next. It's when you get a D that you learn something valuable. It's when you fall on your ass that you actually make progress. I am a complete and total fuckup. Which is exactly why I am equipped to write this book and tell you how to live.

The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity.

y father was otherwise occupied in his role of highly functional alcoholic professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts. He had psoriasis that covered his entire body and gave him the appearance of a dried mackerel that could stand upright and wear tweed. And he had the loving, affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified wood.

My father was otherwise occupied in his role of highly functional alcoholic professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts. He had psoriasis that covered his entire body and gave him the appearance of a dried mackerel that could stand upright and wear tweed. And he had the loving, affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified wood.

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.

Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the bodies of your brothers. But we cannot change our bones nor our body.