Quotes About Struggle

This house has been my cross to bear," she was fond of saying. She had come to see her staying on amongst the "riffraff" as the will of God. He had placed her here as a model of clean Catholic living. She was not obliged to speak to any of her neighbors, only to offer them her good example.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone.

It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.

and yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people's cruelty toward "the other"—those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them. . . .

So much for 'Give us your tired and hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The world is made of stairs; some go up and some go down. . . .

I was watching how we'd filled the room with floating smoke, how our slightest movements stirred it. I was back at our old house on Carter Avenue, the night Daddy threw the barbell and Ma soaked herself in the tub, smoking, her brown nipples half in, half out of the water.

Getting your head shrunk could only take you so far, and then it came time to drop to your knees and humble yourself. Ask forgiveness of God the Father. Or, in my case, God the Stepfather. And, goddamnit, my knees just didn't seem to bend that way.

Maybe you inherited craziness like you did brown eyes or frizzy hair, I thought. Maybe you just went nuts and did that sort of thing if your mother got a divorce and a new boyfriend.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.

You think it's worth it? That we're over there for the right reasons? He shrugged. Politics is a luxury you can't necessarily afford when you're over there. You just get up, do your job, and embrace the suck.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That

If I talked, I might cry.

AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl.

Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other." "Like Van Gogh.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way, I told myself. I bet she's had a very hard life.

busting his agates

Stop it! My whole life still hurts!

One of two things was happening. Either Merton College had folded over the summer and been too cheap to spend a stamp to tell me, or the other girls had seen me struggling up the long flight of steps and locked the door.

I wasn't crazy about this idea, but it seemed less complicated than suicide. All I'd have to do was sit in the dark and breathe.

I was on the brown plaid sofa, watching TV and Scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger, my mother was having her nervous breakdown.

Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.