Quotes About Struggle

You can't assimilate Indian ghosts. It's too late!

I think about seventy percent of my depression was my seventeenth-century warrior trying to get out.

Because we shared the loneliness that was one shape. Because I knew that in her old age she shared that same boat, where I had labored. She crested and sank in dark waves. Those waves were taking her onward, through night, through day, the water beating and slashing across her unknown path. She struggled to continue. She was traveling hard, and death was her light.

Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?

His worst enemy would succumb to this treatment.

Whenever his ambition was about to devour him, his conscience urged restraint.

I think that we Americans, at least in the Southern col[onie]s, cannot contend with a good grace for liberty until we shall have enfranchised our slaves

Two people competed for the position—

were attempts by indebted farmers to lighten their debt load.

Eliza's death, far from putting the whole situation to rest, only inflamed John's feelings anew, complicating his stormy relationship with his father.

He didn't enjoy responsibility and never learned to cope with it.

Those who refuse will be crushed.

In a little more than two years, they had suffered their father's disappearance and their mother's death, reducing them to orphans and throwing them upon the mercy of friends, family, and community.

Human affairs are always checkered and vicissitudes in this life are rather to be expected than wondered at." 18

He continued to slip into depressions that he couldn't shake, and his triumphs seemed only to deepen his gloom. The sea alone would lighten his mood.

Jack's way of shielding his mother from his father's growing number of affairs

Hamilton had analyzed his own rejection thus: "I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connections. If I have talents and integrity…these are justly deemed very spurious titles in these enlightened days.

Junior was making progress after his breakdown but was still weak;

Well, Grant, We've had the devil's own day, haven't we? Sherman remarked. Yes, replied Grant with a drag on his cigar. Lick 'em tomorrow though. p205

He could not immediately regain his balance.

Hamilton's crowded years as treasury secretary scarcely exhaust the epic story of his short life, which was stuffed with high drama. From his illegitimate birth on Nevis to his bloody downfall in Weehawken, Hamilton's life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.

He had to bide his time, though, because he first had to dispose of two legal challenges that dogged his footsteps throughout 1879.

As early as 1882, he lamented to the Reverend Edward Judson that he was swamped by charitable appeals, many from Baptist causes.

Yet financial differences quickly soured his relations with Morgan.