Quotes About Struggle

Because I had gone through the same thing. I had tasted the darkness." "You'd 'tasted the darkness', had you?" "I'm allowed to have some poetry in my life, Valkyrie." "'Tasted the darkness, I swear to God... What, did you have a darkness sandwich, or was it a whole plate? What did you have for dessert? Was it pretentiousness? Did you have a bowl of pretentiousness for dessert?

Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.

As Bonaparte would sigh centuries later, it takes very few defeats to unmake a self-made man.

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don't happen to like them all that much there's nothing you can do about it — unless you're prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I'm not the type. —Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87

I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.

It's wearying, like Caliban buttonholing you in hell and telling you the struggle he's having getting along with himself.

There are times, I don't know if they come to everyone, when I feel that the future is beyond my strength: too much horror to deal with and no help to turn to.

Back trouble was the curse of the builder and

he himself would have fought back. Not easy when you're naked,

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?I who have cursedThe drunken officer of British rule, how chooseBetween this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.

the mantra of 'you can be anything' creates more pain than pleasure.

I knew that not all whites are racist, but that the oppression she was committed to resist was racial and emanated from whites.

Regrettably, I paid far less attention to all those students less able to overcome the hostility and the sense of alienation they faced in mainly white schools. They faired poorly or dropped out of school. Truly, these were the real victims of the great school desegregation campaign.

Work and sacrifice, as important as they are, have never been sufficient to gain blacks more than grudging acceptance as individuals. They seldom enjoy the presumption of regularity, the sense that they belong or are competent, which whites may take for granted.

Everybody at some level believes in it. It's a deeply seductive image. The image that we all want, as oppressed people, is an image of our masters finally loving us and recognizing our humanity. It is this image that keeps prostitutes with their pimps, the colonized with their colonizers and battered women with their batterers. Everybody dreams of one day being safe.

My parents were typical of many who drilled into me at an early age that because you are black, you have to be twice as good to get half as much. Unspoken in that advice is that whites are presumed competent until they prove the contrary. Blacks are assumed to be mediocre and certainly no intellectual match for whites until their skills and accomplishments gain them an often-reluctant acceptance.

Brown, in retrospect, was a serious disappointment, but if we can learn the lessons it did not intend to teach, it will not go down as a defeat.

I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.

When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

a system of domination will always be undernourished.

It will be very hard. You'll make a million mistakes, and you'll pay for them all, one way or another. But the hard parts will be your parts, they won't be hard parts other people have imposed on you for their own reasons, or maybe for no reason at all. And your ownership of them – your responsibility to and for them – makes all the difference in the world.

All of my dreams or hunted by nightmares; yet I have boundless visions that are worth millions. -MillYentei