Quotes About Struggle

Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness.

It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.

He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed.

The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness.

To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.

Teaching writing is a hustle.

By midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and the other eight were wilder than deer, scattering along the fence and bunching and running in a rising sea of dust as the day warmed, coming to reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering of their fluid and collective selves into that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague.

In the grueling light that passed for day...

He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.

Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life.

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.

The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.

los sueños correctos para un hombre en peligro eran sueños de peligro y que lo demás era sólo la llamada de la languidez y de la muerte.

Salió a la gris luz y se quedó allí de pie y fugazmente vio la verdad absoluta del mundo. El frío y despiado girar de la tierra intestada. Oscuridad implacable. Los perros ciegos del sol en su carrera. El aplastante vacío negro del universo. Y en alguna parte dos animales perseguidos temblando como zorros escondidos en su madriguera. Tiempo prestado y mundo prestado y ojos prestados con que llorarlo.

Where man can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone.

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I don't recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.

There's too much shit still down the road that I got to deal with. It aint goin to end here.

They struggled forever in the roads cold coagulate.

I got no reason to be afraid of God. I've even got a bone or two to pick with Him.

If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

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.