Quotes About Struggle

We must ask ourselves: what should we demand of ourselves, given the imperfections of politics and the disappointments of history.

Money, it is often said, does not bring happiness; it must be added, however, that it makes it possible to support unhappiness with exemplary fortitude.

My position was a common one; I wanted to do the right thing but could not help regretting the damnable expense.

The gift that isn't big enough to make a mark, but is too big to leave the possessor in peace. And so they can't be content to be Sunday painters, or poets who write for a few friends, or composers whose handful of delicate little settings of Emily Dickinson can't find a singer. It's a special sort of hell.

Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.

I managed to make it clear that what I most wanted was time to grow up. The war had not matured me; I was like a piece of meat that is burned on one side and raw on the other, and it was on the raw side I needed to work,. I thanked her, as well as I could, for what she had done for me.

What had Pledger-Brown said? Too bad, Davey; he wanted blood and all we could offer was guts.

Poor woman, I suppose she led a dog's life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong.

Heroj modernog doba, to je ?ovek koji iz unutrašnje borbe izlazi kao pobednik.

But I can endure a surprising amount of midnight torment without being absent from class sharp at nine the next day. I suppose that marks me as something not quite up to the Byronic standard.

The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years.

What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?

You remember the little poem by Ibsen that I quoted to you during one of our early meetings? MYSELF: Only vaguely. Something about self-judgement. DR. VON HALLER: No, no; self-judgement comes later. Now pay attention, please: To live is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self.

and his goose would be cooked; probably suicide would be his only way out.

grates. As he worked, he was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus and the cruel king's terrible fate. No sooner had Kim cleared an area of its filth than it became refouled with a fresh

Too often, our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they succeeded in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remained pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to struggle for change.

Thelonious had been born into extreme poverty. His mother and grandmother spent their lives scrubbing floors for a living, and his father, Thelonious, Sr., cobbled together work as an unskilled day laborer in the railroad town of Rocky Mount. His grandfathers had lived a life of debt peonage, share-cropping for ex-slave masters and surviving pretty much from meal to meal.

Many grim tales stem from your green lands, and still deeds both noble and evil shall yet unfold there.

He walked as he'd learned to walk, with only a minimal limp, back straight, head held high in confidence rather than cockiness. He walked like a man who had learned to lean into God for whatever strenth he needed.

like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.

I am hurt...in ways you cannot see, and that I cannot explain, even to myself, but only know that they are there, and a part of me, as much as my hands and eyes and breath are a part of me.

One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams.