Quotes About Struggle

Sam believes in taking life in his two hands and squeezing and pounding it until it gives you something, even if it's just a little bit. But the important thing is to keep squeezing, keep pounding, keep working.

There was hope, not much hope, but some, that her husband would change. She dreamed he would stop drinking up his paycheck, stop disappearing for days, for weeks, for months. She dreamed he would stop running around and shaming her, dreamed she would not have to beg him for money for milk for the baby, Sam. She dreamed that this time it might be bearable, it might last. She didn't want much, really, just something decent. All she got was me.

Dodging potholes so old and deep that the devil must use them as a shortcut home...

These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.

I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world.

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.

Does he bite?" the driver asked. "He even bites me," I said. He picked a fight with whatever the world brought him, and that day it happened to be a Lincoln. I don't think he would have hurt the driver, but he sure would have messed up a nice suit. The next week he did it again, and the next.

only low men, the lowest, tormented the weaker things in their control.

If it had not been for clam chowder, I would have jumped from a bridge into the frozen River Charles.

But I knew, as I staggered down that hill with that awful dog, what the unreliable men in my family have always known: that this ol' life can be a bleak, sorry, boring slog, if you take the time, at every turn, to think it through. { Three } Tough Guys The dog lay in the garage as I cleaned off the mud and old blood with a rag.

Even though his pocket's were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was poor as poor got outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like a suit of mail (...) I think it's much more civilized to knock someone on their ass, than the cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York.

Even though his pockets were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was as poor as poor could get outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like mail. (...) I think it is much more civilized to knock someone on his ass than cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking.

Talk of making a sacrifice is all fine and well until it is your time to be brought to the altar as an offering.

think I will never feel normal again, or do simple things with simple pleasure. An anchor is tugging at my chest, and I feel if I don't resist I will be pulled under, and my heart will drown.

Scriptures reveal that two acts occur continually before the throne of God—intercession and accusation. The conflict between these two is a focal point of the battle between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness.

Deze hele strijd ging om mensen en toch werden mensen vaak als het minst belangrijk beschouwd. Wij strijden vaak meer voor waarheden, dan voor mensen voor wie de waarheden gegeven zijn. Wij strijden voor bedieningen over de hoofden van de mensen heen, voor wie deze bedieningen zijn

child!" the Reverend thundered after Edward committed sins as heinous as spilling his milk at the supper table, or failing to wash away a trace of dirt from his hands before inspection. "Edward, fetch the rod." His father would command him to get the viperlike leather strap hanging from a nail inside the study near the painting of Golgotha. Edward would tremble. He had long ago forsaken pleading for mercy. Begging was a sign of weakness, a failing

Tree limbs scraped at her face and arms, snagged and pulled at her jeans and backpack. Thick wild growth, practically impossible to walk through. But Paige kept moving, banging her walking stick against the trees and brush, feeling herself moving in a downward slope.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.