Quotes About Struggle

The demoniacal powers know this and do all they can to push you to strain your mind. It can be strained by dwelling on one theme until it cannot see anything else clearly—or by worry, anxiety, or even excessive "thinking" as to what is the will of God.

I thought I'd lost you, and I went nuts. Fucking nuts. I've spent the last few weeks trying to forget you. I wanted to convince myself that you were right. That we weren't right. I fucked Rachel, trying to forget you. It didn't work. I can't. The thought of being without you anymore is too depressing for words. Say you'll come home with me, Aaron.

He could no longer separate sex and love. Not now that he'd known--and destroyed--love. Since he couldn't seem to fall out of love with Gordon, he was stuck not liking sex with anyone else.

I was turning 20 during my first record. Those decade birthdays always kind of cause me, it seems, to reflect, look back, and then look forward. I just was closing this period of my life where I was living in a car and scrambling my whole life to then signing a six-record deal with Atlantic.

This is the best worst time of my life.

Saved From Myself How often I've cried out in silent tongue to be saved from myself in the middle of the night too afraid to move horrified the answer may be beyond the capability of my own two hands so small

We are not in the business of fighting darkness. We are farmers of light.

I did not write love songs as a sixteen-year-old. I did not write about crushes or about mean girls. I wrote about my life—about the injustices and inequities and the search for answers and self-responsibility.

Upon the streets a kitten's mew and beggar's shoe are calling and the voiceless ask to borrow yours so sweet and always falling. — Awaken, Love

Life takes each of us to the anvil, shapes us with fire and hammer, and some of us break while some of us become stronger, more able to face the day. Even happy.

My pop didn't go to war, but he's been disappearing just the same.

No science fiction or fantasy is going to help me. I live in a too-real world.

I hope the teacher doesn't say, 'Write an essay about your summer vacation.' If she does, I'll leave the paper blank. Else I'll have to lie. Say eviction is the best vacation. Hearing Ma weeping and Pa wheezing, cracking his knuckles while Leda sucks her pacifier, double-time, and Ray holds my hand. I never lie. I won't. It's better to keep quiet.

Last year, even my best friend, Keisha, stopped speaking to me when my family became homeless.

The hardest word for me to say is please. Being poor, you've sometimes got to ask for stuff - food, toothpaste, even soap. I don't want to ask anybody for anything.

We have life, but this does not mean we are better people. In fact, we must struggle even more than mortals do to remain good. How easy it is for goodness to have no meaning when punishment, retribution- or hell- have no meaning. It makes as much sense for Eleanor to choose thrill-seeking or Samuel to choose murder as it does for you and me to choose love and family.

People come to poverty in two ways accumulating debts and paying them off.

God is closest to those with broken hearts.

The world is cruel. It does not have to be ugly.

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

Where ever i go, the Cultural Revolution followed me

I was willing to take on the struggle to establish myself in a new country because I knew that was the price I would have to pay for the freedom to think, speak, and write whatever I pleased.

Many friends have asked me why, after all I went through, I did not hate Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution in those years. The answer is simple: We were all brainwashed.

Anger rose in me. Didn't they know how hard I'd been working to overcome my family background? Now all my efforts were wasted.