Quotes About Struggle

I'm almost thirty and my day job is folding shirts at the Gap. Have you seen my room? I'm not messy. I'm rebelling against folding.

This is what it means to be in the middle of love, I thought. Being in the middle of love is like being in the middle of a war zone.

I was just sick, beaten, in a city of millions, of suffering by myself. I was twenty-seven going on sixty-five. I should have received Social Security for my misery.

I didn't want to go through all the shit anymore- the feeling of being so fucking in love every single day that it hurt like a gunshot in your gut. Who the hell would want to feel like that for the rest of their life?

I was looking for someplace to store all the things I was feeling - the friction, the contradictions, the unmerciful truth - but my heart, my soul, my eyes and ears and even my toes were locking their doors. They wouldn't let me in. For safety reasons. I had no choice but the throw the feelings away.

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed—and who try to make slaves of all of us—and they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare—and without their musical and ideological miscar-riages to compare our Song of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with—and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never knows its speed, its power.

When you're twenty-three and you fall in love, you tend to think that love will supersede any problems. But no matter how much you love somebody, no matter how desperately you want a relationship to work, life can act as an oxidizer and corrode it to pieces.

I led Paul out the door, and neither of us said a word while we crossed the street. Once we made it to the other side, Paul stopped to stare at the building. He was babbling incoherently. The only words I caught were "fucking uptown" and "pancreas." He still had the doorman's pen in his hand.

I'm trying to quit," he said. "Just so you know." He lit the cigarette and inhaled so long and so deep it sounded like air being let out of a tire.

He thought suffering was cool. He thought it made him a better writer.

I guess I need to find a happy medium, someplace between giving them what they want and ending up face-down in a pool of my own goddamn integrity.

Life is short and a man should take pride in his work, even if his work makes him feel like a total loser

But sometimes talent isn't worth shit. There are tons of talentless people out there making zillions of dollars. And unfortunately, an equal number of brilliant artists whose names and voices you'll never hear.

I have everything on my side except destiny

Realizing that no matter how much you love somebody, no matter how desperately you want a relationship to work, life can act as an oxidizer and corrode it to pieces.

My lust never flourished arbitrarily. Life had never been that easy for me.

No one commits suicide because they want to die." "Then why do they do it?" "Because they want to stop the pain.

My soul is withering.

Desperately wanting to communicate with someone who no longer exists is essentially a lesson in gravity. No matter how hard you try to overcome it, it will always pull you down.

Life, Love, and the Goddamn Pursuit of Happiness.

I don't know anything," she said. "Except that desperation and fear make a person do really stupid things.

I showed up, shut up, and made it work. But it felt like compromise. And if you ask me, compromise feels like amputation.

Cancer doesn't discriminate.

I've got some battle wounds.