Quotes About Struggle

I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own.

Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.

The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform.

Henri Matisse once said, "It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe.

My mind becomes congested, jammed with feelings and thoughts that I can't formulate nimbly enough.

Once upon a time there was an island visited by ruin and inhabited by strange peccant creatures. "It's a sad place," I say, "and too much like my own life." He nods. "You mean, the losing struggle against inscrutable blind forces, young dreams brought to ruin." "Yes," I tell Coover, "my young dreams are gone. I lost the struggle a long, long time ago.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita. I am you. If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize. Like the bullet, I too stray. Forgive me.

Literature gives me life and life kills me.

I have reached the age where life has become a series of accepted defeats—age and defeat, blood brothers faithful to the end.

My soul is fate's chew toy. My destiny pursues me like an experienced tracker, like a malevolent hunter, bites me and won't let go. What I thought I left behind I find again. I'll always be a failure, then, now, and forever. Fail again. Fail worse. I witness my life's collapse.

I have my writers' neuroses but not their talents.

My Existence is Uncomfortable for People

can't keep blaming her. She hasn't had any opportunities, has had to make do. She's had a tough life. But I can't seem to stop criticizing her. Whenever I gingerly remove my mother's noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

My soul is fate's chew toy.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.

This village is a real trap. Bit by bit it will eat up every single person who remain here. This place will never change.

Brahma was excessively sparing with earth, water, and fire.... The reckless expenditure of air and ether in his composition was amazing. And, in consequence, he perpetually struggled to outreach the wind, to outrun space itself. Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the Horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin.

The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart . . .

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

The little flower lies in the dust. It sought the path of the butterfly.

If the day is done, if birds sing no more, if the wind has flagged tired, then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me, even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk. From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended, whose garment is torn and dustladen, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night.