Quotes About Struggle

every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word.

When ambition is exponentially greater than resource, said Prahalad, that's when real innovation happens.

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.

It is to do with John Overall's lust. The poor man, who was forty-four in 1604, found it easier, he told his friends, to preach in Latin, which he had studied so hard and so long, and that he found it 'troublesome to speak English as a continued oration'. Despite (or perhaps because of?) that rather unworldly removal from everyday discourse, the dean fell in love with and married the sexiest girl in London. Anne Orwell was irresistible:

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

And then again, maybe it was some weird noise in my brother's head, some little digital murmur he never told anyone about. I've heard about that – how you wake up one day and there's like this permanent dial tone droning somewhere behind the meat in your head, a little Dustbuster trapped where the brain saves you from going crazy. After a while you wind up ending it all just to make things quiet again.

No one answered. You could hear the light buzzing over us. I love that sound. It means school isn't working, that the teachers are losing the battle.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are...

Deader than a coffin nail, because a coffin nail is still performing useful work, and so in one sense is as alive as it's ever been. Dead as hope. Dead as our financial affairs. Gone.

She had typed A Murder of Quality under protest, but this time she declined, so David had to rely on the Embassy secretaries instead. In a letter to Ann written in June, he complained that 'the new book drags along but the girls are all away and there's no one to type it'.35

Nous avons appris en Europe, par une dure expérience, que les gouvernements étaient bons à quelque chose, et que la liberté mal cultivée donnait, comme tous les arbres sauvages, des fruits souvent très-amers.

et lorsque les armées victorieuses d'Annibal et de ses puissants alliés semblaient devoir apporter à Rome, d'un moment à l'autre, la destruction ou la servitude.

The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces.

As Mazzini put it, writing in 1849: 'The masters of the world had united against the future.' But they had also left a poisoned chalice no less toxic than the acqua tofana whose menace exerted such a spell. When the future caught up with them, in 1917-18, it detonated a series of events which would cost the lives of untold millions and lead to the near-destruction of European civilization.

But if I tried to be really good and studied very very hard, perhaps things would become different one day, I would think. Meanwhile, I must not tell anyone how bad it really was.

but the beast was man, had always been man.

As J. G. Ballard pointed out, civilization is just a thin, fragile veneer over the law of the jungle: Better you than me. Better your kid than my kid.

Adrian McKinty

Life's tough and even tougher when you're stupid

Your body is a blade sharpened by tears

Adrian McKinty

To quote Bugs Bunny, it's mongoose season, and you're the fucking mongoose.

The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.