Quotes About Struggle

If you didn't play the plebe system as if it were a game, he thought, it could be a debilitating ordeal.

Gunners sloshed cans of water to cool their glowing barrels while others struggled from the rear with ninety-six-pound rounds on their shoulders.

I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground," wrote the pilot John Muirhead, "for I am strangely bound to all that happened to them.

In a note to a West Point classmate, Eisenhower wrote, "There is no use denying that at times discouragement has piled on top of discouragement.

Men at War: Best War Stories of All Time.

Merde pour la guerre"—Shit on the war.

Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point, They slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike With the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze And their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss, And the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth. The Iliad, Book 4

Lincoln had inelegantly called "the tired spot that can't be got at.

German general who had fought in both world wars now described the Normandy struggle as "a monstrous blood-mill, the likes of which I have not seen in eleven years of war." Omar Bradley lamented, "I can't afford to stay here. I lose all my best boys. They're the ones who stick their heads through hedges and then have them blown off.

Night would end, the tide would turn, and on that turning tide an army would wash ashore in Africa, ready to right a world gone wrong.

Italian troops from the Assietta and Aosta Divisions surrendered by the thousands, grousing at German betrayal. "One never seemed to be able to do enough to please them," an Italian POW explained.

Things are always confusing and mysterious in war," Pyle wrote. "I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys.

Derrien had issued his battle cry, he annulled it by order of Vichy. "November 8, we fight everybody," he wrote privately. "November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody." Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.

The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.

A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street

London—the king's men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, "panting for an explosion.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.

But I just stood there, trapped somewhere between my long-standing comfortable hatred, and what might have been forgiveness. I am trapped there still.

I don't know anything about wars. I don't think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it.

dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades.

You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don't.

and tried to learn to surf, which was really just buying a really small boat and practicing to drown.