Quotes About Sacrifice

You know how athletes get ready for the Olympics? They swim early in the morning and late at night. They run around the track for hours and hours without a crowd to cheer them on.

God damn it, you sang, in your chains, for every thief crucified, for every King and X hash-hashinated, for every Shepard hung by butcher birds from the wire, for every whole note hung by its rope from the score... gnashing lies till they were dead, shaking the lies' bodies to be sure they did not twitch

What if someone had told me, thirty years ago: If you give up, now, wanting to be an artist, he might love you all your life—what would I have said? I didn't even have an art, it would could from out of our family's life— what could I have said: nothing will stop me.

Eventually I'll launch my canoe out my window, when the flood gets up to 17, and make my way to my mother and father, taking no food, in order to get to them sooner—to return, to them, the last breath that each gave me out of their mouth—to return to them the alphabet they had entrusted to me.

If you've ever been treated like a goddess, I'll tell you, it messes with your judgment. You forget, if you ever knew it to begin with, that lots of goddesses end up sacrificed on some altar or other.

People always say they're willing to die for the ones they love, as if nothing else they could do would be so hard. But it is harder to keep living for someone else, doing everything in your power to keep that person safe and breathing.

I think my sacrifice was a counterweight in the great balance of justice. Because I was willing to give so much, Seka was willing to give so much. My actions in some sense inspired hers, even though neither of us knew what the other was planning. She probably slipped from camp with Mally in her arms the minute I swallowed the fatal dose. The universe loves such symmetry.

Give me two weeks to have my baby and then you can kill me.

It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.

She leans over Roop the way Sardarji leaned over Satya the years she cried for children, brushing tears from Roop's heavy lashes with her lips. She strokes her head as a mother would, says. "Slpee little one, we are together now." And Roop sleeps, overcome by the afternoon heat. While Satya watches her. So trusting, so very stupid.

My father's face was not among them. No memorial was built for the men who had survived by selling their souls. The thousands who had disappeared over the years, stained as criminals, who emerged back into the light as neighborhood pariahs for nothing more than the desire to claim an island as their own. No memorial for the men more complicated than martyrs—or for the families who'd had to relearn the hardships of the everyday.

No memorial was built for the men who had survived by selling their souls. The thousands who had disappeared over the years, stained as criminals, who emerged back into the light as neighborhood pariahs for nothing more than the desire to claim an island as their own. No memorial for the men more complicated than martyrs – or for the families who'd had to relearn the hardships of the everyday.

I got shot saving you. That should speak very clearly about my feelings. After all, I'll bear the scars of loving you for the rest of my life.

Proving I'm a good mother is the one achievement I'm most proud of. It's brought out the best in me.

Huge amounts of blood were shed to make and maintain the Soviet Union. Some of it was the blood of idealists, some of thugs and careerists, but most of it was the blood of ordinary people whose main concern was survival.

In death, he had given her what remained of his life, and this was the most beautiful thing. Perhaps we can only give in total beauty and simplicity in the moment of our dying, because that is the only giving that demands no return.

I named this wrestling place motherhood for here's where I saw God face-to-face and yet my life was spared.

I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men—they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before—out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction.

Walking away from you with a broken heart is easier to handle than selling my soul to make love with you. I'm sorry, Adrian. I might be lonely, and naive, and all the things you think about me. But I'm also true to myself, and I won't denigrate my feelings for you. They're much too precious in a world that offers so little love.

Through this liberalism, the government took a kind of benevolent dominion over the fate of minorities and the poor, not to genuinely help them (which would require asking from them the hard work and sacrifice that real development requires), but to achieve immunity for the government from the taint of the past.

The victim of oppression is always, and understandably, startled and resentful of the anxieties and burdens that new freedom entails—its call to greater responsibility, discipline, and sacrifice. But there it is.

The "Appeal to Love" was an essential part of the very structure of the Shining Barrier. What it meant was simply this question: what will be best for our love? Should one of us change a pattern of behavior that bothered the other, or should the other learn to accept? Well, which would be better for our love? Which way would be better, in any choice or decision, in the light of our single goal: to be in love as long as life might last?

Thus we were perfectly aware that the central claim of Christianity was and always had been that the same God who made the world had lived in the world and been killed by the world; and that the (claimed) proof of this was His Resurrection from the dead.

Compromise is sacrifice when it costs you your peace of mind. Friendship is idolatry when it costs you your self-worth. Love is lust when it costs you your purpose.