Quotes About Struggle

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

Most of us are really willing only to write well, and this is why the act of writing strains us.

real artists can survive the most hostile environments and yet find their true calling like homing pigeons. That's hogwash. Many real artists bear children too early or have too many, are too poor or too far removed culturally or monetarily from artistic opportunity to become the artists they really are.

Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us. MEISTER ECKHART

We all know how broke-crazy-promiscuous-unreliable artists are. And if they don't have to be, then what's my excuse?

going sane feels just like going crazy.

When well-meaning parents and friends push marriage or nine-to-five or anything on us that doesn't evolve in a way that allows for our art to continue, we will react as if we are fighting for our lives—we are.

Many artists begin a piece of work, get well along in it, and then find, as they near completion, that the work seems mysteriously drained of merit. To therapists, this surge of sudden disinterest ... is a routine coping device employed to ... ward off vulnerability.

atrapados entre el sueño de la acción y el miedo al fracaso, es donde nacen los artistas sombra.

As blocked creatives, we are willing to go to almost any lengths to remain blocked. As frightening and abusive as life with a crazymaker is, we find it far less threatening than the challenge of a creative life of our own.

si ser artista te parece demasiado bueno para ser verdad, te inventarás un precio a pagar por ese sueño que te resultará inasequible.

These artists, shadow artists through no fault of their own, hear the distant piping of the dream but are unable to make their way through the cultural maze to find it.

Debemos permitir que nos golpee el rayo del dolor. No lo olvides: este dolor es útil, el relámpago ilumina.

we often resist what we most need.

Remember that it is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work.

Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción

Soy feliz en mi amor, pero esa espada suspendida sobre mi cabeza a todas horas, a veces me ciega el sueño y me angustia de tal modo el alma que me asaltan y me tiemblan los más horrendos presentimientos. Ese es mi destino: la sombra al lado de la luz, el dolor junto a la felicidad.

Where is the voice of freedom, / freedom to laugh, / to move / without the heavy phantom of despair? (From Farewell from Welfare Island)

Puerto Rico depende de tu vida y tu nombre, colgando en ti van millones de esperanzas para resucitar en lo que nos fue robado y hacer valer de nuevo el honor de la Patria. Puerto Rico depends on your life and your name, resting on you are millions of hopes to be resurrected in what was stolen from us and to renew the worth of the Nation's honor. (Puerto Rico está en tí / Puerto Rico Is in You)

Vive América, Bolívar, y también vive tu espada mientras haya un solo esclavo que te ultraje o un tirano que pretenda profanar la libertad. Bolívar, America Lives! and your sword also lives so long as a single slave rapes your ideal or a tyrant tries to profane liberty. (From A Simon Bolívar / To Simon Bolívar)

Rio Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. LLanto grande. El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños, si no fuera mas grande el que de mí se sale por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo. Río Grande de Loíza!...Great river. Great flood of tears. The greatest of all our island's tears save those greater that come from the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people.

Happiness doesn't come easily, just because you want or even deserve it, she said. I don't think you're too young to know that. So you've got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens -- but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world.