Quotes About Struggle

In interviews I gave early on in my career, I was quoted as saying it was possible to have it all: a dynamic job, marriage, and children. In some respects, I was a social adolescent.

Her mind circled and darted like a bird whose nest has been destroyed.

I'm not a very good [father], I'm afraid," Martin said. "Ach." Marianne waved this away. "I'm sure you are." Sitting here on this weather-beaten porch, with its brittle railings and the dull pounding of the sea below, he felt a gray bloom of failure. This was why he had come to see [her]. She was the gardener of this ugly flower. She knew just how to turn his face to the sun.

copy: "I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

For years, I occupied my time trying and failing to be the woman the men in my life wanted me to be. Never just me. I ran into situation after situation, telling myself that the reason I had so much anxiety and was scared to death to be alone at night was because I just needed to be a better person for whomever I was trying to please at the time.

I just feel like I'm going through so many changes," I said to Johnny one night over scotch. "It's hard." "Nah, change is easy," he said. "Staying the same is a lot harder on you.

First, I wanted to tell my parents what was happening to me. What had just happened again the night before. For me, this would be a confession, because I felt like I might be sinning by allowing her to continue to do these things to me. I was the victim, but somehow, I felt in the wrong.

I thought I had the job, and now I had to change myself to be "Jessica Simpson." It was as if he tied my value as an artist to my weight right there, like a rock, and then threw it out the window of the thirty-second floor of the Sony building. Maybe Tommy was being realistic about the times, and he knew what it would take for me to be successful. He believed in me, and he would be a beautiful part of my career, but it was hard to hear what was required to be a star.

When people saw the real me, they wanted me to succeed. It was a fleeting thought, and I wish I had caught it and internalized it. I still thought people expected perfection.

Damn you!" he reviled her, "damn you for your physical charms!

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework. If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.

So remember, this is definitely a screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don't situation. You just remember to say, "Screw them.

Social expectations about what constitutes a good or a bad mother haunt every decision, and the rise of the parental advice industry ensures that moms and dads feel inadequate at every turn.

I spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don't "speak from our power," but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice- as if we had actual power to speak from.

Who would I be if I didn't live in a world that hated women?

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything that we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting the story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Who would I be if I didn't live in a world that hated women? I've been unable to come up with a satisfactory answer, but I did realize that I've long been mourning this version of myself that never existed.

Why should I bring happiness to those I loathe by obliterating myself, when I can make them miserable just by existing?

I find it tiresome when people parade their agonies for public viewing; the last thing I want to evoke is pity. We are all the walking wounded, your pain is no worse than everyone else's.

There are limits to self-improvement. Inevitably you hit the point where what you are is, well, what you are, and all the teach-yourself videos and easy-to-use equipment on those creatinous home TV shopping things can no longer ward off you confrontation with your self.

He made writing look easy and critics hate that. They like evidence of a struggle, of creative agony, wringing the masterpiece out of one's guts. After all, most critics think of themselves as writers, or had attempted to become writers. This leads to the bizarre situation in which failed writers pass judgment on writers who actually write for a living.

since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present.

freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than in that of outright Fascism.