Quotes About Struggle

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth.

life was a stone cutting and grinding...

She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.' Same things we fight over these days,' Terri said. Laura said, 'Nothing's changed.

All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round – about and mysterious than others. from "In Switzerland

It was only late at night, on the nights he was not with Carol, that he wished for an end to the love he still had for Eileen and felt tormented as to why all of this had happened.

But for some reason—who knows why we do what we do?—his drinking picks up.

He says he can't understand these people. "People who sail through life like the world owes them a living.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is ever happy anywhere.

Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they? It takes about three years. Three years? He looked shocked. Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody's eye.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.

Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.

Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his teeth in.

Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram.

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.

Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay bank at whose edge a few unbeatable wild flowers clawed and hung on like naughty children who won't go to bed.

you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes.

A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.

Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.