Quotes About Sacrifice

Some people give time, some money, some their skills and connections, some literally give their life's blood. But everyone has something to give.

It's humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself--your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience--to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package.

Suppose that preventive care uncovered some condition that would require agonizing treatments or sacrifices on my part - disfiguring surgery, radiation, drastic lifestyle limitations. Maybe these measures would add years to my life, but it would be a painful and depleted life that they prolonged.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person's reckless mistake. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.

She would die of him or be cured.

Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.

Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes," he still loves to say, as often as possible. "It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.

Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them," she said. "It works out.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly.

We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance

Until that morning when we all went to the riverbank, I still believed Mother would take Leah, not me. Leah who, even in her malarial stupor, rushed forward to crouch with the battery in the canoe and counter its odd tilt. I was outshone was usual by her heroism. But as we watched that pirogue drift away across the Kwenge, Mother gripped my hand so tightly I understood that I had been chosen. She would drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act as a mother. I think probably it was.

In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.

Lily picked up her spoon and dipped into Rock Bottom Farm's maple ice cream. We could hear the crash of corporate collapse with every bite. Tough work, but somebody's got to do it.

We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.

Mother, you had no life of your own.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person's reckless mistake. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice. Mom was the unknown soldier.