Quotes About Struggle

There are so many people who would love to be able to live in peace, but there are so many others who do not want to let them. Mr.

None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.

Insincerity had never come easily to her, but good manners required it on occasion, even if a superhuman effort was needed.

Everybody who consulted her was, in their way, hurting--even this rich man with his big Mercedes-Benz and his expensive cuff-links. Human hurt was like lightning; it did not choose its targets, but struck, with rough equality and little regard to position, achievement, or moral desert.

There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.

Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

It is very difficult sometimes to keep upright.

We think that we can fix our lives by taking some simple step, but it's not like that. Most problems need lots of sticking plasters. They need coaxing and massaging and looking at from all sorts of different angles.

The queue for happiness was not well ordered, he thought; it stretched out and wound round corners, and sometimes, it seemed, the end was so hard to see.

The world was not perfect -- it never had been and never would be; it was full of pitfalls and problems, of fear, of regrets, and of bitter tears. Here and there, though, there were tiny points of light, hard to see at times, but there nonetheless, like the welcoming lights of home in the darkness. The flames that made these lights were hard to ignite, but occasionally, very occasionally, we found that we had in our hands the match that could be struck to start one of these fires. p. 197

she had not had the time to love her children, because all her energy was spent in simply keeping them alive.

We have always asked too much of women in this country. They hold up the sky on their shoulders.

He felt weary. Life was a battle against wear; the wear of machinery and the wear of the soul. Oil. Grease. Wear.

a prison of put-downs and belittlements.

All that I know is that he is sad in his heart...that is the place where his sadness is. Right there. And I do not think that is ever very easy to deal with sadness in that part of the body.

the world was a vale of tears—it always had been.

There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.

There were so many lives, she thought, that could only be led with difficulty, with pain, and because we were so bound up in our own lives, so many of these were invisible to us until suddenly we saw, and knew, and felt that sudden pang of human sympathy that comes with knowing.

Life's goalposts, and hurdles too, are never in the right place, she told herself; and they have the unfortunate habit of shifting within seconds. One sees them, and then suddenly they are no longer there, where they should be, but somewhere altogether elsewhere.

Sometimes wickedness prevails.

Time, she felt, made quite enough claims on us, without our conniving in its relentless tyranny.

Things start badly—very badly—and then they change for the better and those who have nothing, or who are unhappy, or who live in fear, suddenly find that these things that were bad for them have gone." "It's like rain," said Mma Potokwane, who had not said much but had clearly been affected by the story. "The rains come and they wash everything away. The dryness, the thirst, the dust on your skin—these are washed away, Mma, all washed away.

He came over the border at night, as he had no papers. It is not easy, Mma, to have no papers. If you are a person without papers, then you are nothing. Even cattle have papers these days, Mma—I'm joking, of course, but that is what it can feel like to have no papers.