Quotes About Struggle

If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It's harsh and cruel. But that's why there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world was what it should be, to show it what it can be.

Back in my day, which was about a week and a half ago, we took our lumps and we got back up and we cried like babies and quit and then put on weight.

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. It's the story I wanted to live - somebody who appears to be, or is, weak becoming stronger.

Life's not a song. Life isn't bliss, life is just this. It's living. You'll get along. The pain that you feel can only heal by living. You have to go on living. So one of us is living.

Everything is a drug. Family, art, causes, new shoes... We're all just tweaking our chem to avoid the void.

Malcolm: So me and mine gotta lay down and die... So you can live in your better world? Operative: I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. I'm a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it. But it must be done.

War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.

When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn't realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that it would take hard work to make the words of the Declaration of Independence mean what they said. Ellen and William Craft were willing to do their part.

Once there were songs for everything, Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting, For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep, For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war. For death (those are the heaviest songs and they Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief). Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and Falling apart after falling in love songs.

No. I was not okay. And neither was James Baldwin though his essays Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight To assert humanness in a black and white world.

I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn't your real husband, he was a bad dream - an alien of sorts - who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.

That was struggle enough; however, there was another plane of consciousness on which I was fighting every night that I lay down to rest. As I slid into the borderlands between waking and sleeping, negative beings attempted to pull me into their darkness. I learned to escape them by using words to make a ladder to bring me back.

Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. We were all haunted.

I grow tired of the heartache Of every small and large war Passed from generation To generation. But it is not in me to give up. I was taught to give honor to the house of the warriors Which cannot exist without the house of the peacemakers.

You have paid the cover charge thousands of times over with your lives and now you are afraid you can never get out.

my father staggering in drunk, beating my mother, the shame and hate in him burning, burning. Then he'd hit my brothers. And then me whom it was said he loved most. He'd save me for last, when his anger was ashes, when the fire was hottest. And then he's hold me, 'Sugar, sugar', he's croon, the tears so thick they made a lake on the linoleum floor.

She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded her up like death, discordant, without logical and beautiful conclusion.

I remain very aware of my failures and often run them obsessively through my mind, which is a failure in and of itself.

I've learned there are many genealogies. Within our family is a genealogy of rage. There is also a genealogy of justice. I would show you a map, but I am still searching the roadway for casualties.

I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories.