Quotes About Struggle

your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.

Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I've ever made. But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn't the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn't have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn't seem that way at the time.

The truest story is always the widest one. It's the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.

You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you're fucked before you begin.

Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

Adrienne Rich … did not die a woman who denied that her wounds came from the same source as her power. In fact, she spent her life making power from those wounds [but] Marie Curie… didn't have that luxury — she had to deny that in order to be who she was in her time. But we don't. And I think so much of the work I've done … and the work I hope I continue to do, is about writing into those wounds.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.

We act as if we don't know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that's changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.

Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering.

You loathe yourself, and yet you're consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You're up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.

she said things I already knew but needed to hear again. How in darkness, we are waiting. How it is in the times that we must search hardest for the light that we are most profoundly transformed.

We're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way,

Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out—though surely there's something there too—but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.

Tvoje p?edpoklady o život? druhých lidí p?ímo souvisejí s tvou naivní nabub?elostí. Mnozí lidé, o nichž si myslíš, že jsou bohatí, nejsou bohatí. Mnozí lidé, o nichž si myslíš, že to mají v život? snadné, museli tvrd? pracovat. Mnozí lidé, kte?í zdánliv? jen tak proplouvají životem, trp?li a stále ješt? trpí.

You're up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.

You have a bundle on your head, sweet pea. And though that bundle may be impossible for you to see right now, it's entirely visible to me. You aren't torn. You're only just afraid.

It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.

I was sexually assaulted at seventeen. I was naïve and I didn't understand it. Anxiety became a deep part of my life, and it almost pulled me under. Trudging onward was all I could do. I've made peace with it.

fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of

You say your marriage is "loveless" and perhaps you're correct that your relationship has come to its natural end, but I'd like you to consider the notion that you aren't the best judge of that right now. You're a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects, and a pile of bills. I wouldn't expect your marriage to be thriving. I doubt you've been

He had no words for it, what made him, what pained him, what rocked him and fucked him.

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve. And "if your Nerve, deny you—," as Emily Dickinson wrote, "go above your Nerve." Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.