Quotes About Struggle

I've created a monster, he muttered thickly and quickly positioned her over his lap. I need to come, Grace. Bad. I'm shaking like a virgin, but you've got some catching up to do.

That bitch fate has a cruel sense of humor.

I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I'd be missed. Killing myself was my job, my responsibility.

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.

When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

TSHEMBE I do not recall that the Europeans have ever been exactly overwhelmed by morality—black or white! Or do you think they have suddenly become impressed because Kumalo is saying the black man wishes freedom? We have been saying that for generations. They only listen now because they are forced to. Take away the violence and who will hear the man of peace? (He sits on the box, an island in a sea of cloth) It is the way of the world, hadn't you noticed?

TSHEMBE Maybe that's what's botched up all the revolutions so far! (Erupting in spite of himself) Mr. Morris, your concern for nonviolence is a little late, don't you think? Where were you when we protested without violence and against violence? We did not hear from you then! Where were you when they were chopping off the right hands of our young men by the hundreds—by the tribe?

Obviously, the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, who are twice oppressed. So I imagine that they react accordingly: as oppression makes people more militant, women become twice militant, because they are twice oppressed.

In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe; and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.

It isn't as if we got up today and said, What can we do to irritate America? It's because, since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation, from petition to the vote— everything—we've tried it all; there isn't anything that hasn't been exhausted.

TSHEMBE You thought! You thought because I am a black man I have answers that are deep and pure. I do not!!

Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, There you go. She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, There you go. -- Willing

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.

Sometimes it seemed that she and rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.

It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.