Quotes About Struggle

But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.

People do kill themselves, you know, Miranda, when they think their whole reason for living is being taken away from them. Even the fact that other people think their suffering is a joke isn't enough to shake them out of it.

It was four in the morning, the hopeless hour when shivering insomniacs inhabit a world of hollow shadow, and existence seems frail and strange.

It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.

difficile est longum subito deponere amoren, difficile est, uerum hoc qua lubet efficias… …it is hard to throw off long-established love: Hard, but this you must manage somehow…

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

Such is the universal desire for fame that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can't go on. I don't really know when I stopped loving him,

Strike would have advised any friend to leave and not look back, but he had come to see her like a virus in his blood that he doubted he would ever eradicate; the best he could hope for was to control its symptoms.

that at least, while fighting, she knew she was alive.

She had drawn strength from everyone else's weakness, hoping that her adrenaline-fueled bravery would carry her safely back to normality,

Abused people cling to their abusers.

A pause. Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.

Si te parabas a buscarla, podías encontrar belleza casi en cualquier parte; sin embargo, muchas veces, la batalla para llegar al final de cada jornada te hacía olvidar que existía ese lujo, y que era gratis

How many more burdens was he supposed to bear? Had he not paid enough, given enough, sacrificed enough—loved enough?

In a family there is always something or other going awry… Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

No stranger to trouble myself, I am learning to care for the unhappy. Virgil, Aeneid,

He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.

Jesus fucking Christ," said Strike, "is he mentally ill? Of course he is," he answered himself immediately. "Of course he's mentally ill. He wants to cut his fucking leg off. Jesus fucking Christ.

Her hair stood back on either side A face bereft of loveliness. It had no envy now to hide What once no man on earth could guess. It formed the thorny aureole Of hard unsanctified distress. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge The Other Side of a Mirror

She hadn't needed her own lawyer to point out that Matthew appeared to be trying to force her to spend money she didn't have on legal wrangling, to run down the clock and her resources until she walked away with as close to nothing as he could manage.

Strike had long since come to believe that she engineered situations out of an apparently insatiable need for conflict.

Es esa mierda del poeta herido, del dolor del alma, las gilipolleces de soy un genio demasiado torturado como para poder lavarme. Lávate los dientes, cabrón. No eres el puto Byron