Quotes About Struggle

He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.

He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail.

My dad used to say, you young never carry your weight.

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He

He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying

Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be His name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fuck God for not saving us, fuck God for not fucking being here and for not fucking saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo.

the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family.

There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things.

Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.

After all, it wasn't food; it was survival.

they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror.

I'm getting used to it now. His moods, his unpredictable explosions, horrible words and terrible things spewing out of his mouth. When he comes into a room, I go out, not to make a point or anything, not loud like, but quiet as a mouse, hugging the wall so that he will not notice I was ever there.

threatening apes. What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He

the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family.

and every word sounded both a defence against what he truly felt and a betrayal of all that he was.

behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed; determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary.

Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

You survived. Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?" I don't, of course, believe this. Most things that don't kill us right off, kill us later.

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.

when you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it.

It's hard to go through life without killing someone.