Quotes About Struggle

She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic--drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.

Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.

Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

You can wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick, dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There is nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and wait. You wait for the train to pass.

Farmers aren't rich. They have land but no money. Actually, my father didn't even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, Someday kids, all this will be yours. But his knuckles hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn't that big.

She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.

You always say that, said Evan, but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then after a while you say you're going crazy again, and you start all over.

Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

Una vida así requería una autoestima exagerada. Suponía tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperación, y ponerlas al tuntún, como países tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...

She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth. -Terrific Mother

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 kindness 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.

Music ultimately left him unstirred. Like a god irritated with his own tinkerings. Despite his talent, or perhaps because of it, he heard only the machinery, the clanking and spitting. He felt nothing. No compassion.

You live if you dance to the voice that ails you.

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.

A veteran of the gender wars.

Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.

So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.

In a life where there is only the bearable and the unbearable, a sigh of relief is an ecstasy.