Quotes About Struggle

she knew we were foster children, that Yvonne wouldn't keep the baby. She'd already decided we were irresponsible and deserved every bit of our suffering.

Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.

This ragged heart, she said, pulling at her kimono. I should rip it out and use it for compost.

Doesn't anything matter to you?' 'Survival,' I said, but even that sounded untrue now. 'I guess.' 'That's not much.' I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. 'I haven't gotten any farther than that.

That fucking crow-bodied thing had won. How gleeful it was now. All because he'd wanted to live, forget genius and destiny, and simply be happy. And it wouldn't let him.

She was tired, her nerves stripped like wires, the red and white. She felt like a saint with the arrows shit through, she was bleeding to death.

Michael hated this, it was the worst thing he could imagine, disappearing into the mass- he didn't know how to submerge himself, he was the puzzle piece that fit nowhere.

When anybody could tell, nobody was ever going to give fucking peace a chance.

The phoenix must burn to emerge

And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother's gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn't let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.

Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

What, in all the world , could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.

The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

Life is hell, but there are prizes.

Then I rise disembodied from the dark to grasp and attach myself like a homeless parasite to the shape of my identity and its position in space and time. At first, I cannot find my way, I cannot find myself where I left myself, someone has removed all trace of me.

It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk.

All happy families are alike in the pain their members helplessly inflict upon one another, as if under orders from a perverse higher authority.

Third, COAs' greatest difficulties are in the area of their relationship with themselves. Their greatest difficulty is the lack of ability to experience themselves as valuable and worthy and lovable. Their greatest assets are a capability of offering you the sense that you are valuable and worthy and lovable. There is much to be gained from being involved with a COA.

Without that forgiveness, that peace, no heart is ever happy. There is always an inner struggle. Pain. Only when God has been invited in-to manage one's life, to direct one's thinking, to be in control-can one ever get away from all the conflicts inside. We have to stop struggling against His will before we can find real joy.

This is life in a fallen world, where wars come and go, where nations rage and people cry in torment. We must be strong, not in ourselves, but in Him. And trust that His love and His wisdom and His light will see us through.

There had been incidents meant to remind them that they were being watched. Yet there had also been more arrests and darker threats and cruel floggings. The religious authorities had no intention of letting the group continue unchallenged. When any possible reason for an offense could be generated, they took full advantage.

When men don't have God, they need substitutes. To my way of thinking, whiskey is a poor substitute—but many men depend upon it. But what I am angry about is that they didn't obey my orders.