Quotes About Struggle

What a wild dilemma, how to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear

It is in times like these that we face the most cunning of tricksters. We might even find a trickster in the seat of power.

I have no more land. I am driven away from home, driven up the red waters, let us all go, let us all die together and somewhere upon the banks we will be there.

There is a field of talking blood that I have not been able to reach, not even with knives, not yet.

Or maybe you are my own life scheming desperately to climb back in.

Because who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant to survive?

Maybe then we will see the design of the two-minded creature And know why half the world fights righteously for greedy masters And the other half is nailing it all back together

In the United terminal in Chicago at five on a Friday afternoon The sky is breaking with rain and wind and all the flights Are delayed forever. We will never get to where we are going And there's no way back to where we've been.

We tried to pretend war wasn't going to happen. Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding more. They started teaching our children their god's story, A story in which we'd always be slaves.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.

When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible to see your opponent is you …

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

We are beasts and this is our consolation.

Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.