Quotes About Struggle

They were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are; being men rooted out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss together on the rough seas, with masters no less cruel.

The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.

Truly, when the gods set their faces against you, you are fucked.

O to break loose, like the chinooksalmon jumping and falling back,nosing up to the impossiblestone and bone-crushing waterfall.

Gored by the climacteric of his want,he stalls above me like an elephant.

We beg delinquents for our life.

I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

My mind's not right.A car radio bleats,"Love, O careless Love…. " I hearmy ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,as if my hand were at its throat….I myself am hell;nobody's here.

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed.

We feel the machine slipping from our handsas if someone else were steering;if we see the light at the end of the tunnel,it's the light of the oncoming train.

The twinkling steel above me is a star; I am a fallen Christmas tree. Our car Races through seven red-lights—then the road Is unpatrolled and empty, and a load Of ply-wood with a tail-light makes us slow. I turn and whisper in her ear. You know I want to leave my mother and my wife, You wouldn't have me tied to them for life Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Time runs, the windshield runs with stars.

Oh to break loose like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall.... Time to grub up and junk the year's output, a dead wood of dry verse: dim confession, coy revelation, liftings, listless self-imitation, whole days when I could hardly speak, came pluming home unshaven, weak and willing to read anyone things done before and better done....

No ease for the boy at the keyhole, his telescope, when the women's white bodies flashed in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail. Nothing! No oil for the eye, nothing to pour on those waters or flames. I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

you trip and lance Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping The jellied iridescence of the crab.

Why do we hunger so for vicious things? Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.

I find that I fall into two parts which roughly correspond to instinct and conscience. To use a figure, I might characterize both parts as writers. Neither one, as far as the simple daily calls of life go, is much of a success.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. from "Epilogue

My trouble seems [. . .] to be to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness. One can't survive or write without both but they need to come to terms.

Help, saw me in two, put me on the shelf!

Brother, try, O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life.

only by suffering the rat-race in the arena can the heart learn to beat.

Who can help us from our nothing to the all, we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check?

There'll come a moment when you think you can make it, and you'll try.