Quotes About Struggle

The thing which does surprise me is my own optimism. Surely I ought to recognize now that my number is up. Where do I always find enough courage for one more last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.

I started auditioning when I was about 10 and I didn't get my first job until I was 12, and two years at that age is really hard.

come un cavallo da tiro ha la sensazione che Il suo carico cresce di minuto in minuto, e le zampe gli si piegano, ma gli occhi miti non riescono a guardare indietro, così lei non vedeva da quale parte fluisse questa enorme e inutile vita su lei, e solo sapeva questo: che doveva portarla.

When you're right there in the crisi, you'll do anything to make yourself feel better, distract yourself from the misery, deny reality, not matter how stupid.

Jeder Mensch bekommt eine bestimmte Zeit im Kontinuum der Menschheitsgeschichte und jeder bekommt seine Herkunft und bestimmte Eigenschaften vererbt, die alles bestimmen, jedenfalls fast alles, was er sein wird. Mit dem Rest freien Willens kann er sich ein Leben lang herumraufen und versuchen, ihm seinen unverwechselbaren Stempel aufzudrücken und sich von der Hypothek seiner beschädigten Eltern zu befreien.

not since I sacrificed the word love for the thing have I fought such a mind in my war.

Marrying into money was not a good thing for me.

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is 'the struggle of the Workers against Capital'. 'In that case,' replies the policeman, 'you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other.

This is what happened: we were completely abandoned. No one had the courage to attempt the impossible. We were slaves without honor. We were strangers in our own land. Then one man stood up. A nameless man, without any money, without a crown. One among millions. He lifted our hearts up to the stars. We followed him and swore him allegiance. The best of us died for him. We all would die for him. If he unfurls the flag we are ready to march against hell for him and for Germany. A

Death was just as close, but not behind him; it was everywhere. It was inescapable; he felt death's physical presence—as if death itself were something alive. Like in the old pictures, a creature that can hide behind a bed of asters or behind a baby carriage and can come out and touch you.

Und wenn er auch nur noch die Kraft für eine einzige winzig kleine Bewegung hatte, auf die Freiheit hin, wie sinnlos und nutzlos diese Bewegung auch sein mochte, er wollte diese Bewegung doch noch gemacht haben.

Wenn ein noch so winziger Streich gelang gegen die Allmacht des Feindes, dann war schon alles gelungen.

Noch hatte keine Schuld ihre Helligkeit getrübt, keine Ahnung, dass das Herz unter dem Druck des Lebens sich auf allerlei einlassen muss, was es dann später vorgibt, nicht begriffen zu haben- aber warum hat es dann so bang und hastig geschlagen?-, [...]

Un po' di felicità quotidiana, subito, invece di quella terribile, spietata lotta per la felicità assoluta di chissà quale umanità della quale lui forse non avrebbe nemmeno fatto parte.

Even if he had only enough strength left to take one tiny step toward freedom, no matter how ridiculous and useless the step might be, he was going to take it.

If you're fighting and are killed, another takes up the banner and he fights and is killed too, and the next one takes up the flag and dies too. That's the natural sequence of events, for you don't get anything for nothing. But what if there's no one there who wants to take up the flag because no one knows its meaning?

All those boys and girls out there, once they'd passed through the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service and the army, they were like the children in the saga, children who'd been raised by wild animals to rip apart and devour their own mothers.

The fiancé was in the same SA division, not because he couldn't live without a brown shirt, but because he wanted to be able to work, to get married, to inherit his parents' farm, and to live in peace, which he would certainly have been prevented from doing otherwise.

We all felt how profoundly and how terribly outside forces can reach into a human being, to his innermost self. But we also sensed that in that innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable.

Wir fühlten alle, wie tief und furchtbar die äußeren Mächten in den Mensch hineingreifen können, bis in sein Innerstes, aber wir fühlten auch, dass es im Innersten etwas gab, was unangreifbar war und unverletzbar.

Of course, it was possible that Fiedler might die more quickly and more terribly than they had feared in the struggles he'd gotten involved in. Only in times when nothing at all is possible anymore does life pass by like a shadow. But those times when everything becomes possible again contain all of life as well as death and destruction.