Quotes About Struggle

I could see through it, but that didn't make the more difficult thing any less difficult. What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning.

this cat-and-mouse could not last forever, and he also knew that when you are the mouse you don't have much to say about it to the cat.

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ 'Coal Black Horse

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ 'Coal Black Horse

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) There is always something. And I said, Maybe not on the Judge. And he said, Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

And he said, 'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

He was a lawyer now and it had taken him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his own terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something...

But it wasn't a Primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the backroom of Casey's Saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic Party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes, and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood.

Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don't listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic.

But why should I lie here longer? I am not dead yet … And the world's way is yet long to go, And I love the world even in my anger, And love is a hard thing to outgrow. —Robert Penn Warren, from "American Portrait: Old Style," Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978<.i> (Random House, 1978)

El hombre es concebido en pecado y nace en medio de la corrupción, y pasa del pestazo de los pañales al hedor del sudario. Siempre hay algo.

They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.

nothing ever happened to Jack Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps this was the curse of Jack Burden: he was invulnerable.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying, 'Flee, all is discovered.' It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire.

Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way." "All right," I said.

You can't make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand straw from the cowpen.

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity […] The human frame just ain't built that way.

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles