Quotes About Struggle

You don't have to destroy me. Do you? ...

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down a a typewriter and bleed. E. Hemmingway We don't write to be understood, we write to understand......... Love yourself. Dare to dream. Live on purpose!

Man is not made for defeat.

You're awfully dark, brother, he said. You don't know how dark.

That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.

It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.

Fish, the old man said. Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.

Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Half fish, he said. Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing.

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

The fish is my friend too, he said aloud. I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

What kind of a hand is that,' he said. 'Cramp then if you want. Make yourself into a claw. It will do you no good.

There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything.