Quotes About Struggle

We try to do right, and we ... we ... they gang up on us, fear and pain and revenge and ... and then we find we've done wrong.

Invisible factors in my life would inevitably lead to my downfall. I felt I had known this all along. There was no escape.

Sometimes everyone does their best and things still end up wrong.

I cannot perch among those who think I am broken. "The thing is, Mother, you weren't broken," I muttered, as if she were standing right next to me. "I am. And it was you who made me this way." Inside my head, the [memory] box twitched like a thing alive.

There is no pain - free path, sweet girl. Choosing is what makes like bearable.

And there are no years without plague. Some years it doesn't reach the rich, but it always lurks among the poor.

And neither do you deserve all the blame. Sometimes everyone does their best and things still end up wrong.

We are all pulled toward our doom in exactly the same way, by exactly the same force.

That must be a wretched existence, forced to lie when you don't want to.

Dying took commitment. It was easier to go on living incompetently. What if she put off deciding until tomorrow? She needed time to get the nerve up and work out a foolproof, painless way to do it. Until then, she'd walk on - badly.

I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wonder whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I'd never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn't have to work this hard.

Why must duty require me to break my own heart?

This was Miss Blanche's daughter? She was a mess. A beautiful mess.

The Lord and I aren't exactly on speaking terms.

Surely she imagined things. But change in her life, her family's, especially around Christmas, meant pain, betrayal, trauma, and death.

If you knew how hard I found it to stay on my side of the hall last night after we finished watching the movie…" He shook his head. "Your parents absolutely wouldn't approve of the direction that my thoughts are going.

And I thought, of all the girls in this town, she is the one that I absolutely can't find fascinating." "Is that the reason you sounded like you really didn't want to take me home after that first night of pizza?" "Yep. I wanted to limit contact. I was trying so hard not to fall for you." "Well, that's why I knocked you over," I said. He laughed.

Some days are diamond. Some days are stone.

At sixteen, she was already over drinking, over "being bad.

I think we're too unhappy to get a divorce.

Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.

Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don't. It can't be reduced to money. I can't explain why I do it. It's a kind of impulse.

I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.