Quotes About Struggle

This is not a time for hereos because nobody will let it happen

I'm sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle

And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely--taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say

The doctors told me' -- her voice sang on a confidential note-- 'that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dead, and in his grave--long in his grave.

Rosalind: Cecelia, darling, you don't know what a trial it is to be like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance, my partner calls me up on the phone every day for a week.

Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don't even take the trouble of expressing myself so that when I reread myself I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he'll work it through.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world's weight he had never chosen to bear.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself, he cried, But that is all.

In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.