Quotes About Struggle

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.

Such were the factors that detached Ormus Cama from the ordinary ties of family life. The ties that strangle us, which we call love. Because of the loosening of these ties he became, with all the attendant pain of such becoming, free. But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must forever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, Ikick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Doyou hear? I refuse to choose.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

Confusion to our enemies!

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning,of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart.

Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?

He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.

Rich kid, Shiva yelled, you don't know one damn thing! What purpose , man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason , yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you -- you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind !

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.

When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?

But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll;

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.