Quotes About Struggle

Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Brontë, who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman, had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.

I am a restrained person. Otherwise my heart would race past my tongue to pour out everything. Instead I mumble, I gnaw myself. I lose hope. And my mind is burning.

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone's arm after you grab it?

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.

Three days (so I hear) she is without food, keeps her body pure of bread, longs to run herself aground in a sad secret death. Is it a god inside you, girl?

The fact is that there are people, good people who, not because they want to but all the same, fall in love with the wrong thing.

Nighthawks I wanted to run away with you tonight but you are a difficult woman the rules of you - Past and future circle round us now we know more now less in the institute of shadows. On a street black as widows with nothing to confess our distances found us the rules of you - so difficult a woman I wanted to run away with you tonight.

These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood. His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders like the little mindless red animals they were.

to carry one's own door will make a person clumsy, tired and strange on the other hand, it may come in useful if you go places that don't have an obvious way in, like normality or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind

My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.

Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens to the black space where his consciousness is, moving towards her.

From girl to woman to who I am now, from love to anger to this cold marrow, from fire to shelter to fire.

trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.

Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come into the kitchen door. What meat is it, Emily, we need?

Unsociable even at home and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin

Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.

I am not a person who feels easy talking about blood or desire. I rarely used the word woman myself. But such things are the natural facts of what we are, I suppose we have to follow out these signs in the endless struggle against forgetting. The truth is, I lived out my adolescence mainly in default of my father's favor. But I perceived that I could trouble him less if I had no gender.

Nothing is as it was before, after the screen has gone to black. Darkness lies on the soul. To use Beckett's phrase, "what cowers behind it begins to seep through." With her new shopping cart Hekabe, queen of Troy, will be prowling the aisled for dog biscuits.

What sense is there in pain at all—however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?