Quotes About Struggle

I can't be a man in this society unless I am in opposition to power. So, resistance is always synonymous with humanity.

The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.

The plotting he'd had to do to come to this point had exhausted Kidman's capacity for calculation; his natural, impulsive violence was regaining the upper hand.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.

Cousin Mike, the person most people believe put Richard on the path he traveled, died of a massive heart attack in April of 1995. He was overweight and still haunted by the ghosts of things he'd done in Vietnam, regularly using heroin. The Army gave Mike a hero's burial with a twenty-one-gun salute.

Unlike Jesus, Satan, he felt, would not scorn him, but

Richard began going to Jehovah's Witnesses meetings on Sapian Street with his friend Eddie. At the meetings, he heard about the treacherous, terrible power of Satan—how if a man wasn't careful, he'd be in the grip of Satan before he knew it, destined to all kinds of pains in hell. Richard often had thoughts of violence fused with sex that were far from Christian. He knew they were diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Church.

Hän uskoi sisimmässään, että mitä hirvittävämpiä ja pahempia hänen hyökkäyksensä olivat, sitä tyytyväisempi saatana olisi ja soisi hänelle tulisen siunauksensa.

Julian bought a few bottles of wine and beer. In the car on the way to the house, Julian said, "Why? Why do these things happen to me; what did I do to deserve such a fate, such a thing? I always did my best, didn't I?

Soon after their marriage, Julian got a job as a laborer in a Juarez clothing factory. Mercedes continued working in El Paso as a domestic. The poverty and crime in Juarez in the 1940s was extreme and Mercedes was unhappy living there. Because she'd been born in the States, she could, if she chose, live in El Paso. Julian was not an American citizen and could not move to El Paso until he was approved by the U.S. government.

Richard didn't know why he had these uncontrollable desires involving bondage and rape, but they were there, and he had no say over their comings and goings (as with his epileptic attacks). He knew they were wrong—were against the Church—but they, to him, were bigger than the Church, bigger than life itself, and not about to go away.

Richard's first day at school was not as a joyous time in the Ramirez household as the other children's had been. None was doing well in school. Joseph and Ruth got by and stayed out of trouble, but Ruben and Robert were always in trouble, getting failing marks and getting into fights.

That night she again slept in the back of her brother's car, hidden under her raincoat, afraid of the rats, of the police, and of men who got their kicks from hurting women. Ruth knew it was a cruel world filled with people who were capable of terrible things.

We in the West are accustomed to thinking that humans are all basically the same underneath our different cultural clothing, that the concerns the middle class struggles with in contemporary society are at bottom the same concerns with which all other classes societies and cultures struggle. To glimpse the possibility that that is not so comes as an unwelcome surprise.

Gratitude is a burden upon our imperfect nature, and we are but too willing to ease ourselves of it, or at least to lighten it as much as we can.

condemning a war that, due to college draft deferments, was being fought largely by soldiers drawn from the working class, with blacks a proportionately high percentage.

Work stoppages in America declined from 3,111 in 1977 to only 385 by 1995, even as real wages lost 15 percent of their value—data that, as if on a diagnostic chart, revealed an ailing U.S. labor movement.96

working at reduced pay, with marginal perks and nonexistent health coverage.

then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."23

jealous men only tormented themselves.

In all of life, but especially in war, the greatest power belongs to fortune. —CAESAR

They saw their injured country's woe; The flaming town, the wasted field; Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; They took the spear, - but left the shield.