Quotes About Struggle

Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Most simply but profoundly, I chose to live an honest life, which I think as a gay person is not a given.

It's so weird, like, it's not like Gamergate is the only bad thing to happen to me. I've been homeless before, I've had to come through other stuff. A profoundly abusive childhood, but at least that stuff feels like I got to move on from it, that stuff is in the past.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

I spent a year in a 12-step program, really committed, because I could not believe what had happened - that I might have killed myself.

I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately.

M.G.M. never really gave me a break. They loaned me out for leading roles but cast me in programme pictures.

Top Boy' isn't the type of programme that is trying to be righteous and have a happy ending, it is just real.

I think that genetically we're programmed to battle each other.

The displacement of scripted series by reality programming continues to be a severe obstacle to a working actor's ability to earn a living.

Some of the free lunch programs were still goin' on - based on the last leg of the Black Panther Party.

You see, the poverty program for the last five years have been buy-off programs.

I tried a few grad school programs because I didn't know how to make it... Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called 'The Hill.' Even though my interest in politics wasn't huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

There is not a great sense that the Americans know what they are doing, or are making much progress in Iraq. And there is satisfaction in seeing that the Iraqis are successful in resisting the United States.

I've had a couple of years where injuries have not let me develop in the way I wanted. When I was 21, after the European Championship, I had more injuries. Everything has been less continuous and it has cost me more progress. Continuity is what got me where I am.

You don't get the good without the bad, but you really do have to see it all in order to make progress.

The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress.

The progress in Iraq has not been without cost.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.