Quotes About Struggle

Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.

The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.

The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, "The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.

we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light?

We cannot expect life to be perfect. But we can expect to see life come from death. We can expect to see morning after night. We can expect that acceptance of the struggle will give rise to the victory over self.

We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to everything. We confuse "stagnant" with "calm" and call it holiness. We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life.

War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.

after all we had been through, we would still risk death rather than live under communists. The craving for freedom was too strong.

To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don't we? We have to go on looking for justice... and settling for revenge.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

I'm going through hell," I cried, "and Steve wants me to be thankful he baked a pie." (272)

The Flock have come a long way in their acceptance of this, and when a professional refused to deal with them in a straightforward manner and, in fact, manipulated and deceived them in return-they rebelled fiercely but self-protectively.

When the Jo personality first told him of the diagnosis, he called MPD "clinical bullshit." Then, seeing Jo's stricken look, he softened and showed her how the possibility of many personalities in a single body was philosophically untenable. MPD did not fit into Steve's system of beliefs, and therefore it did not exist.

hurt inside her hardened. She

Life-threatening illness calls us to a place—metaphorically a desert or mountain peak—where, as we sit, the hard wind of reality strips away all the trappings of life, like so much clothing, makeup, and accessories.

People don't want to see women doing things they don't think women should do.

And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

She limped, unaided around the house, like a bird with its wing broken. Tame, because it couldn't fly away. All her time was taken up with managing herself, working out new ways to do things. Being a different person in the world.

There are 2 ways of crying-on the outside or from the inside-and I've been crying on the inside most of my life.