Quotes About Struggle

Don't fall. It seems we've struggled for so long. We've trampled on the backs of apes to clutch the muddied hems of angels.

Truly, life is hell and death's rough hand our only deliverance.

Crazed with helplessness, I cursed God and wept, wondering if he wept also.

Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.

is that what happens to us? a life of conflict with no time for friends ... so that when it's done, only our enemies leave roses.

He'd been wrong to tell the freaked-out teenager that it would all get better, because actually it didn't. It just faded to a deep held chord, a pedal-organ drone behind the normal noise of life, a thing that you forgot about and thought you'd put away forever, but it was still there. It was still here. He

For soon, the dark millenium will fall, and the world will be a different place, requiring different species. Cataracts will occlude the Sun, shutting out its hateful light, and fabulous new life-forms shall flourish and struggle beneath the perpetual stars.

You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders.

Deep down the fear of a man who lives in a world not made for him, whose own world is slipping away, dying, being destroyed, beyond any recall.

All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg.

Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us? Who knows why the warm flesh of a child is such comfort, when one's own child is lost and cannot be recovered? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul.

He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God?

And that next day, he was in the black mood, what we call the swartgalligheid, which is the black gall. And the heart is black too, and the world is black, and one can tell oneself that it will pass, but these are only words that one speaks to oneself, for while it is there it is no comfort that it will pass.

Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

His son had gone astray in the great city, where so many others had gone astray before him, and where many others would go astray after him, until there was found some great secret that as yet no man had discovered.

And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That men should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? Yet men were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love.

He says we are not forsaken. For while I wonder for what we live and struggle and die, for while I wonder what keeps us living and struggling, men are sent to minister to the blind ... Who gives, at this one hour, a friend to make darkness light before me?

When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height if a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away, the soil cannot keep them any more.

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, "Where are your wounds?" and if I say I haven't any, he will say, "Was there nothing to fight for?" I couldn't face that question.

the great theme of the private journal in the 20th century is sickness.

I know me, Valkyrie. If I were to lose you in the way that he lost you, if I were to live in a world ruled by the Faceless Ones with no hope of fighting back, no hope of effecting change, no hope of anything … If I go dark a second time, I stay dark. I know that in my soul.

will heal your wounds," he said, "but I will not facilitate your battles.