Quotes About Struggle

You fucked-up hunk.

nobody ever said doin' the right thing was easy. Simple, yeah, but not easy. Rusty

I feel the shadow of wings across my face, Icarus wings, faltering in my flight.

We read about you to be with you, to walk in someone else's shoes, to experience another life. Some of those lives are hard, and others are easy, but we're with you every step of the way. We read about people in impossible situations because we're dealing with horrible things ourselves, in our lives. And you going through your story helps us with ours, no matter how yours ends.

This was all such a waste of time, and after that last fight with what was apparently supposed to be a troll, his arm really hurt.

Truth forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future.

In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.

My mother by then had already begun her own decline, her own transformation, hardening into a bitter rind of a woman who pushed through the stations of her day as though each moment were unpleasant duty; as though the currencies of joy had become so inflated they could no longer purchase anything of worth.

Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog's windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.

She comes to life with a soft exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.

There are men who seem to have seized the trunk of life, and he was one of them. It might not be for everyone, the great, scarring thing you could not get your arms around, but it was there for him.

The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.

She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.

No hay felicidad como esta dicha: mañanas apacibles, la luz del río, el fin de semana por delante. Vivían una vida rusa, una vida fecunda, entrelazada, en la que un infortunio de uno de los miembros, un fracaso, una enfermedad, rompería el equilibrio de todos. Aquella vida era como una prenda de vestir. Su belleza estaba fuera, su calor dentro»

It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one's back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children---she must not reveal it to them.

He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it.

He had not abandoned failure; it was his address, his street, his one comfort.

When our characters show us the full fire of that inner battle, we have the makings of great fiction. For whether the choice is ultimately for honor or dishonor, we will see the consequences and the reader will be instructed without being taught.

A blank page is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

My working definition of a successful novel is this: the emotionally satisfying account of how a character deals with imminent death. Once

Whoever Fights Monsters

Do you think I'm a bad person?" "It doesn't sound like you have enough time in your life to be a bad person." "Then why is God doing this to me?" "God isn't doing this to you. There's a lot of evil out there. When it touches people, they get hurt. No one's immune, not even good people like you.

I am not going to lose Vietnam, he said. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.2 For many Americans then and later the struggle in Vietnam was simply Johnson's War.3

Many black and poor people, moreover, had become politicized by the civil rights movement and had begun to develop higher expectations from life. Some joined a newly formed National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).