Quotes About Struggle

He had spent three hardscrabble years performing on the Chitlin' Circuit—a route of juke joints, icehouses, and barrooms where rhythm-and-blues music was played primarily to African American audiences. Just to get to those gigs, traveling black musicians had to plan carefully in advance such things as finding food and using a toilet, simple services that were denied blacks in parts of white America.

The Christian perceives in suffering a temptation of Satan to separate him from God." —TEMPTATION

Either the Adam in me is tempted—in which case we fall. Or the Christ in us is tempted—in which case Satan is bound to fall." —TEMPTATION

In the temptation of Jesus, there really remains nothing except God's word and promise." —TEMPTATION

The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds they were not worth so much trouble.

Not the five feet of water to your chin but the inch above the tip of your nose.

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

It's hard to convince people when you're just staring out the window that you're doing your hardest work of the day.

Barack Obama knows that to create an economy built to last, we need to focus on middle-class families. Families who stay up on Sunday nights pacing the floor, like my dad did, while their children, tucked in bed, dream big dreams. Families who aren't sure what Monday morning will bring, but who believe our nation's best days are still ahead.

The body, the house of the spirit, is under the power of pleasure and pain," explains a god. "And if a man is ruled by his body then this man can never be free.

To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Everyday. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it's heartbreak most of the time. --Harper Lee

At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure.

Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful...

I could never free myself from the thought that Nature is that which is slowly killing me.

I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can't get it right.

Scribbled in the Dark  A shout in the street. Someone locking horns with his demon. Then, calm returning. The wind tousling the leaves. The birds in their nests Pleased to be rocked back to sleep. Night turning cool. Streams of blood in the gutter Waiting for sunrise.

Making art in America is about saving one's soul.

While you sit Like a rain puddle in hell Knitting the socks Of your life.

The difficulties we face originate from one of three sources. Some are sent to us by the Lord to test our faith, others are the result of Satan's attacks, and still others are due to our own sinful choices.

But ah! disasters have their use; And life might e'en be too sun-shiny.

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

Hamish was like a trumpet in his head. "You will no' die. Do you hear me? You willna' die!" "You're already dead, Corporal. You can't stop me." Rutledge was finding it hard to concentrate. "You willna' die! I willna' let you die!

they are able to forgive themselves, as a wise man once said, for being human. That is knowing that life is hard and virtue rare, they keep the ancient faith that it is better to love than to hate, to live fully even if imperfectly.