Quotes About Struggle

she had to fight for qualities that had not been even in her vocabulary. Patience. Self-discipline. Self-control. Self-abnegation. Chastity. Adaptability to others - this above all. This always.

For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.

She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.

Poor economies breed tyrannies.

Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…" Her eyes reddened and filled, and again she determinedly blinked them clear.

There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.

Please don't be alarmed, you'd be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves.

Der Morgen... oh, wie schwer ist jeder Morgen, wenn der ganze Tag vor einem liegt... jede Aufgabe türmt sich wie ein Berg...

Well, don't you think it's at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don't ever get over them?

The hands were saying: Why do you hurt me like this?—but if you insist then I'll endure it.

But you know how it is—it's always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can't bear it, one needs to bolster him up." "Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?" "Yes, but I never seem to learn.

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

I was marvelling, again, how easy it is, living deprived, to forget love, joy, delight.

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don't realize it.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)

I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.

I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of the church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will be make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.

I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.