Quotes About Struggle

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. [ Interview with Oprah Winfrey , June 5, 2007]

The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall

A malign star kept him.

You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it. Your grandad never asked me to sign on as deputy with him. I done that my own self. Hell, I didn't have nothing else to do. Paid about the same as cowboyin. Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.

Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didn't answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he? I don't believe he much had me in mind.

He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.

In what direction did lost men veer?

They rode in a narrow enfillade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.

I'd rather to make a good run as a bad stand.

I dont know what happens to country.

Sometimes faith might just be a case of not havin nothin else left.

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed & the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history & will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns & cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart.

People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn't have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we'd sent em without rifles I dont know as they'd of been all that much worse off. You can't go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont.

With the final onset of dark the iron cold locked down and the boy by now was shuddering violently. No moon rose beyond the murk and there was nowhere to go.

To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause.

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied.