Quotes About Struggle

And Jim couldn't get a job, though he hunted for one — desperately, eagerly, anxiously. Walking from one employment agency to another; spending long hours in the musty agency waiting-rooms, reading old newspapers. Waiting, waiting, waiting to be called up for a job. He would come home shivering from the cold, saying, 'God damn white people anyway. I don't want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don't they know if I know how I'd change the color of my skin?

Her thoughts returned to Junto, and the bitterness and the hardness increased. In every direction, anywhere one turned, there was always the implacable figure of a white man blocking the way, so that it was impossible to escape. If she needed anything to spur her on, she thought, this fierce hatred, this deep contempt, for white people would do it. She would never forget Junto. She would keep her hatred of him alive. She would feed it as though it were a fire.

Because they sensed that the black men had to roar past them, had for a brief moment to feel equal, feel superior; had to take reckless chances going around curves, passing on hills, so that they would be better able to face a world that took pains to make them feel that they didn't belong, that they were inferior.

Yet she could feel a hard, tight knot of anger and hate forming within her as she walked along. She decided to walk home, hoping that the anger would evaporate on the way. She moved in long, swift strides. There was a hard sound to her heels clicking against the sidewalk and she tried to make it louder. Hard, hard, hard. That was the only way to be--so hard that nothing, the street, the house, the people--nothing would ever be able to touch her.

Lutie sat down near the back of the room. It was filled with colored women, sitting in huddled-over positions. They sat quietly, not moving. Their patient silence filled the room, made her uneasy. Why were all of them colored? Was it because the mothers of white children had safe places for them to play in, because the mothers of white children didn't have to work?

There are times when I have had to make peace with the fact that I am at war.

Her mind, long harassed by distress, now yielded to imaginary terrors.

O Emily! these are moments, in which joy and grief struggle so powerfully for pre-eminence, that the heart can scarcely support the contest!

I've learned that doing what you think is right doesn't always make you feel good. For another, I've learned that sometimes you just have to keep on going when you want to do nothing but drop. And that just doing the everyday things, like keeping a shop running or getting up every morning, will keep the work going until things can straighten out again. And doing those things right every day soon becomes more important than the more pressing issues of the time.

I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer.

He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

Even though many of us are working very hard at it, we rarely, if ever, experience the joy and peace that are promised in the Bible. So what's the problem? Perhaps we are still holding the reins of our lives too tightly, afraid to surrender ourselves to God's Spirit.

But something pulled her through, and that was when I knew there was something more to faith than just believing in a God. It was knowing him in such a way that you could go through hell on earth and still say he is love.

sometimes people couldn't be saved, no matter how much you wanted it, no matter how hard you tried.

our modern day when we can neither endure our vices, nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

They went in a spirit of scientific enquiry, but they could not quite manage to be open-minded; for once on the mountain, strange fears began to assail them. Behind their bravely rational and humanist front, they were still men of the Middle Ages, and their climb became a metaphor for the struggle of Renaissance Europe to get past old ghosts.

If you give up then someday you might give up on your own life.

This cruel age has deflected me, like a river from this course. Strayed from its familiar shores, my changeling life has flowed into a sister channel. How many spectacles I've missed: the curtain rising without me, and falling too. How many friends I never had the chance to meet.

We are all carousers and loose women here; How unhappy we are together!

I have much to do: I must kill my memories down to the last one, I must change my soul into stone , I must learn to live again.

Monstrously giving birth to yourself, Admiring yourself and choking on yourself, Are you not, alas, the only tie Between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise? It seems to me that you are always on the boundary.

All's taken away: my love and my power. The body, thrown into city it hates, Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hour The blood grows colder in my veins.

A town loved with bitter love.

All my contemporaries— hundred-and-fivers or convicts— will tell you how we lived in barely sentient fear, raising children for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.