Quotes About Struggle

No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there's nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.

Why should I let the toad workSquat on my life?Can't I use my wit as a pitchforkAnd drive the brute off?

One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage. Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

It never worked for me. Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity.

XVIII Si le chagrin pouvait Tel un charbon enfoui se consumer, Le cÅ"ur se reposerait calme, L'âme indéchirée serait Tranquille comme une voile ; Mais la nuit entière j'ai regardé Grandir du feu le silence, La cendre grise en douceur s'accroître : Et je remue le réfractaire silex Que délaissent les flammes dans l'âtre, Et le chagrin se remue, et le dextre CÅ"ur gît dans l'impuissance. (p. 31)

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life, and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

How weightless words are when nothing will do. from "Gospel

I have tried to write poetry for people for whom there is no poetry.

The United States has experienced analogous problems of concentration but has a much larger nonwhite population, African Americans

There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [ Pravda ], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.

the Basil Spence Syndrome. When Coventry Cathedral was going up and in the public eye, he went through a lean period when he wasn't offered any jobs at all because people thought he wouldn't have time for anything else.

All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

Its a town eat town world

Nobody wants trouble,' said Chandni. 'Trouble just find us.

She was fifteen years old and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.

Hon är själv fånge i sitt eget fängelse.

Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing deaf and stop herself from crying out.