Quotes About Struggle

I succeeded on my own, why can't you? is a dispassionate call to the majority of Native people to forsake one another. The end results is each of us digging our own way out of the hole, filling up the path with dirt as we go. Such things as justice and principles prevent the whole people from becoming dispassionate. Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted with enslavement.

The result of being colonized is the internalization of the need to remain invisible.

I fell, okay? Then clawed your way out like a bad zombie movie?

This was bad. This was toss-Emma-back-into-the-mental-hospital-bad.

He's gone, Sara said. I can feel it. This time for good. Natalie hugged her, and she started to sob. Then Harry shattered the silence with a pained yell, hurling his thermos into the woods. With tears in his eyes, he said, I want a drink. I hugged him fiercely. It'll have to be one of my special chais, Harry. Have I made you a dirty one yet? I want mine filthy, he said. We trudged back to the museum together, and toasted Coby with dirty vanilla chai lattes.

I arise each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day. —E. B. White The

If Strength comes through Suffering, why then I should be the strongest of all women, yet I am the weakest. God help me. Help me.

They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you.

In the parlance of today, our family was dysfunctional (is any family not?) I would never become an angel, or even a saint. Instead I would grow up wild, marry young, and settle down. We'd have two boys, forming our own dysfunctional family. We'd do the best we could. Then we'd divorce, and I'd feel kindly nervous myself. I'd remarry. I'd try like crazy. (We all do, don't we? We try like crazy.) My new husband and I would form our new, blended dysfunctional family.

We can't treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it.

Even to someone as notorious as Madonna, I think Jesus would say, 'I'll help you experience the fulfillment that has eluded you despite your struggle to find it. I'll help heal whatever's driving you to affirm your self-worth in self-defeating ways. But I can only help you if you let me.

One writer referred to the problem of pain as "the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don't have faith in two plus two equals four or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture describes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find him. There are clues you can follow.

Pride is the rope God allows us all.

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sin, you know, and cry tears doing it that are genuine as any.

But I shook my head. I just couldn't go with him. Nor could I tell him it wasn't his public mistreatment that stole my breath and blocked my tongue; it was something too mean to explain. It was the fact that Chester the Fester, the worst man I'd ever seen, even worse in his way than Israel Finch, got a whole new face to look out of and didn't even know to be grateful; while I, my father's son, had to be still and resolute and breathe steam to stay alive.

Once torched by truth, a little thing like faith is easy.

Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else - ignorance, for example...Sure it's weak, but sometimes you'd rather just have a map.

Once torched by truth, Swede wrote years later, a little thing like faith is easy.

Not anymore—not exactly." If I'd had more words, I'd have described Greenstone's last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically "open," the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner's grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

Even as we sat, prying lids off milk bottles, we could hear the persecuted cooks banging around back in the kitchen, grandmas barking at each other, preparing the daily grotesque.

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry.

I'm still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again.