Quotes About Struggle

If you strike me down, the paperwork will be more time-consuming that you can possibly imagine.

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain't no joke!

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.

How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

It is just as if some phenzy-struck person supposed himself to be grappling with an imaginary combatant, and then, having with great efforts thrown himself down, thought that it was his foe who was lying there;

Again, one man loses by death a much-loved1359 son; another has a reprobate son alive; both equally to be pitied, though the one mourns over the death, the other over the life, of his boy.

I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they're beautiful and famous and rich. I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'd be dead.'

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought, With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.

One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

The idea came to me complete from start to finish – a most unusual occurrence, as any writer will tell you, for ordinarily a story has to be struggled with, changed around and mixed up.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.

Fourteenth-century men seemed to have regarded their doctor in rather the same way as the twentieth-century men are apt to regard their priest, with tolerance for someone who was doing his best and the respect due to a man of learning but also with a nagging and uncomfortable conviction that he was largely irrelevant to the real and urgent problems of their lives.

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in.