Quotes About Struggle

She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint.... but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.

When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

I guess a good man IS hard to find!

Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.

I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction.

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.

The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorr.

He saw that there was something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said, TWO DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE. There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a small chicken hawk sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment. Mose of the hawk's tail was gone; the bear only had one eye.

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.

She didn't like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was—good for absolutely nothing.

Listen here, Mr. Shiftlet, she said, sliding forward in her chair, you'd be getting a permanent house and a deep well and the most innocent girl in the world. You don't need no money. Lemme tell you something: there ain't any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man.

He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.

The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable.

The dead are a heap more trouble than the living.

He had learned enough to hate the destruction that had to come and not all that was going to be destroyed.

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.

His thoughts were heavy as if they had to struggle up through some dense medium to reach the surface of his mind.