Quotes About Struggle

There was a time in L.A. when I drove to 7-Eleven to go grocery shopping, and I locked my keys in my car, which wasn't insured. My wallet was in there, and I couldn't call AAA, because I only had $7 in my bank account. It was one of those moments where I was like, 'O.K., I literally have nothing right now.'

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

It's much more interesting to watch someone who is ill-equipped to solve their problem fight to solve their problem than wallow in the knowledge that they're ill-equipped to solve their problems.

After a casual listen, it might be easy to lump Rocky Votolato in with the downtrodden likes of Conor Oberst and Elliott Smith. But his songwriting is a bit more triumphant than theirs: Votolato would rather pull himself out of a gutter than wallow in it, focusing instead on the victory before the misery.

I grew up in a commissioned house in the next suburb over, Mount Abbot. It was a two-bedroom house with me, my brother, and my two sisters. Mum and Dad slept in the lounge, and we didn't have wallpaper.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.

I was always fighting the establishment, trying to run through brick walls.

I have times when I'm off-balance. I have times when I slur my words. I have times when I walk into walls. I have times when I can't remember somebody's name.

I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.

We have beastly qualities within us. If we're put into certain circumstances, and the walls around us come in tighter and tighter, we all could maybe do dangerous things.

As an adolescent, I was bitter and angry, and I definitely put up these walls.

When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.

'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.

'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.

I may have punched walls when no one else was around.

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

Sometimes I feel like women of the world who are single moms and are working in Walmart are the strongest women out there, and that's what's really exciting to me is being all these different types of women.

My mum was working in Walmart for €350 per month, about £280. My father was working as a house painter. We had a difficult situation with money.

My most difficult thing so far, to be brutally honest, has been to waltz as if I knew what I was doing.

Even though the National Guard and Army Reserve see combat today, it rankles me that people assume it was some kind of waltz in the park back then.

People are always coming up to me, thinking I've got some magic wand that can make them a star and I want to tell them that no one can do that. Making hit records is not that easy. But it took me time to realize that myself.

There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various reasons, not all of them within my control. Since then, I just wander in and out of black moods.