Quotes About Struggle

the old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves.

En el exilio todo intento de arraigo se considera traición: es el reconocimiento de la derrota.

Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy... In the eternal struggle between the world's beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day...[And yet] The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.

Violent action is unclear to most of those who get caught up in it. Experience is fragmentary; cause and effect,why and how, are torn apart. Only sequence exists. First this then that. And afterward, for those who survived, a lifetime of trying to understand

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.

When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.

The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep

because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected phone. I have struggled, in my fashion, to find my way towards an appreciation of the high things, towards a small measure of fineness. On good days I felt it was within my grasp, somewhere within me, somewhere within. But it eluded me. I have become embroiled, in things, in the world and in its messes, and I cannot resist. The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall

In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat.

There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child.

The human race is a life sentence...it's a rough confinement, and sometimes we all need to break out of jail.

O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of...

Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)

and here is Nussie's husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from his son's forcep-birth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a wife, 'unless it's forced out.

Get thee behind me, Satan. Seek not come between a lover and his love.

India's head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her, and there was something wrong with her father's voice on the phone.

I don't want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world--the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle--but on many days every week that's how it feels.

In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired.

O, Need's a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.

PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart.