Quotes About Struggle

How nice to be married with … how many children, Richard? You don't have quite this problem. You don't have any problems really, do you, sitting there in your lordship pontificating? It seems to be beyond you even to get yourself decently drowned.

His chest heaved, and he coughed. You have coughed before, his mother said. It is a sign of weakness. Control it.

He was not his own master when he left Russia,' Sybilla said. 'Nor was he his own master when you brought him to France. He is like a river forced into glass and driven from stem to stem of a conjurer's maze without ever reaching the sea.

What can be done for these headaches?' [...] 'Short of execution,' Lymond said, 'I think the problem is insoluble.

Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters.

It was dark, even at noon, with the snow stretching white and stark to the violet slate of the sky. The frost, grown stronger and stronger, was an antagonist to be studied and countered, like a runagate thief with a knife.

He isn't coming,' said Adam. 'Splendid,' said Piero Strozzi heartily. 'I love him, but I have brethren enough who are trying to climb with a foot on my neck.

I had a sense, I believe, of indebtedness. But someone trussed it in black felt and kicked it to death, as the Turks do.

What is there but untruth and heartbreak wherever you go?

For how long can one maintain total vigilance? For how long can love last, in isolation, without sinking crushed beneath its own pressure?

What he wanted was very near. It was typical of the monstrous, egregious, laughable irony which dominated his life that with every dragging lift of his arms, he should be saying over and over, 'Not yet.'

It began eighteen months ago, Lady Culter. He has tried to end his life twice. Once Archie brought him back. Now I have done the same. We have interfered in what doesn't concern us. He belongs to himself and is at his own disposal. Or else what are we?

If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

It wasn't that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit.

he appeared to be struggling with something trapped in his throat; it turned out to be a word. thanks, he said.

Each evening, after my parents' self-medication, their behavior would change. Some of the time they would be happier and we could get through the evening unscathed. But sometimes it would get ugly.

protested Mrs. Featherstone, a lady in her thirties, whose violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last.

I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.

there's nothin' like Christian feelin's for upsettin' a man's domestic comfort.

Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

I know when I am well off. You had better come up to me.'     'You know I can't.'     'Of course you can't. You can only go down and down.'     'Are you trying to insult me?'     'Yes, but it's very difficult.

You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.' 'I'm afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.' 'It might be the wisest thing you could do.' 'Write it out and get rid of it?' 'Yes.' 'I'll think about that. It would hurt like hell.' 'What would that matter, if it made a good book?

That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.

Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place. Here, then, at home …