Quotes About Struggle

it feels as if half your life is a sort of struggle toward the sunlight. Then you get five minutes in the sun and after that you're dragged down into the darkness again

If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.

the desperation of a mind unable to discipline itself and descending, therefore, into the carnivalesque. A mind imprisoned by itself, serving a life sentence.

In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.

How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?

All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.

Vow," he cried, reeling. "It isn't bad enough being a brown dude in America, you're telling me I'm half fucking goblin as well.

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.

He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.

A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.

Siz olsan?z, s?n?rlar?n karanl?k taraf?na sürgün edildiÄŸinizde karanl??? ayd?nl??a çevirmeye çal??maz m?yd?n?z?

Yenilgiye uÄŸram?? aÅŸk yine de bir hazinedir, aÅŸks?zl??? seçenler hiç zafer kazanmam?? demektir.

Yalan iÅŸi bitince çürüyüp gidecek; Oysa gerçek büyüktür ve galip gelecek, zaferine ald?ran olsa da olmasa da.

Hayat?n sunduklar?n? kavraman?n bu kavray???n doÄŸurduÄŸu sonuçlar? d??ar? yans?tmaktan kolay olmas? gibi. Bir darbe alman?n kar??l?k verip vurmaktan kolay olmas? gibi.

Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.

History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.

An old, secret pain welled up in him, begging for healing.

Su vida había sido una sucesión de actos de voluntad, pero a veces flaqueaba y se hundía

Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.

Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism.

life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.

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.

It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.

it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times