Quotes About Struggle

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

In pleasant peace and security How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die He shall look up above the stalled oxen Envying the cruel falcon, And dig under the straw for a stone To bruise himself on.

This is my last worst pain, the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.

Sad sons of the stormy fall, No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside, Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds, Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain, But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.

Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.

They'd had a fight again. – You'll have your work cut out for you, I said. One of their quiet ones. She laughed. Where they whispered their screams and roaring. She laughed at me. And she was always the first one to cry and he kept stabbing at her with his face and his words.

The family trees of the poor don't grow to any height.

I'd become a bully. The something Ã¢â'¬â€œ the resolve Ã¢â'¬â€œ that had let me send in those first pieces, put them in the envelope and post them; that resolve Ã¢â'¬â€œ it was something like that Ã¢â'¬â€œ or ambition; whatever it was, it was gone. Ambition was a decision, not a trait. There were no more decisions. I couldn't think of anything that I could do.

I think in some way it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.

when the dope fiend who lived there finally got busted. At first I'm thinking the dope fiend is back

I came from a real tough neighborhood. I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

Property is insecure. In this one phrase the whole history of Asia is contained.

Russians like the rest of us prefer to believe that their history has progressed in a straight and positive line. They explain away troubling events such as brutal reigns of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin as necessary stages on the path to greatness.

And this is when I knew I was black for real. This is when I knew black was a city whose walls were constantly under siege....

This is also what it means to live in a time of polio, to be buried unknown, but not less loved than the pope or the president. I want to tell my children this. We are all worried about not being good enough for love. Imagine all we have. Imagine all we love and live through. Imagine what a chance we have to endure the very worst that might come our way.

What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

What about fateful turns in your life? Naturalists like Thomas Hardy proposed that some people are simply born under 'a blighted star' like his heroine in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. If so, then no matter what we did, we couldn't improve our lives.

To think creatively, to struggle with an opaque text or confounding idea, to seek connections between periods of history or disciplines of thought, and to search for the precise word or the right rhythm for a single sentence—these are human actions every bit as worthy as the wielding of a hammer, the manipulation of a surgical scalpel, or the making of a courtroom argument.

Everyday, I think about dying. About disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off things.

Darkie! Sambo! You must think we're dumb. Are we dumb? From the slaveships to world wars, to the underground and the hospitals, it's always been about the labour, never about the living. Cheap muscles and blood to build you an empire.

Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.

For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan.