Quotes About Struggle

My first two years, with Metro, were quite unproductive. Then I had a year at Columbia that was a complete disaster.

No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.

All my life, I had this idea that if I could unravel the mystery that was my mother, then I could help save her. But it didn't really work. We were close, but she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and it was rough at times.

I have a pathological fear of being on my own. When I'm with my own thoughts, I start to unravel myself, and I start to think really dark thoughts, self-destructive thoughts.

I'm literally tone-deaf with singing. It's unreal.

In the Sabs we had to remain in this depressing, unreal world. I didn't like all the devilish boohoo that went with it, to tell you the truth. There was manipulation from outside sources that preferred us to be a certain way. Acting up to that, I felt quite dishonest.

Dale Jr. has never gotten a fair shake from the start because, guess what? He's not his father. He was always supposed to have been someone else. The pressure he's under is unreal.

The Negro problem, like all other political problems, is fundamentally a moral issue. This is realism, not idealism. Those of my colleagues who believe that they are particularly 'hard boiled' because they overlook the fact that human beings are struggling for their consciences are simply unrealistic.

I think all of those things, but certainly the booze really brought out the really unreasonable side of me, and I just didn't want to revisit that place again.

It's unreasonable to expect people who scrape to get by to have emergency savings.

People look for patterns in everything. It's what keeps us sane, I suppose. I struggle to see any patterns in my life. I think I can understand depression a bit because of my sister. My own feelings of... I'm aware that, if you feel down, it can be strangely unrelated to circumstances around you. That's just the way life is.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

But unfortunately, in my unrelenting drive to get back on that drum stool, the major casualty in all of it was that I really forgot about me.

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

A person could look at me through ninety-five per cent of my experience and know that I had no shot. Because I was so unreliable. The only thing you could rely on me for was to betray you.

I wake up at night thinking about Euripides' 'Hecuba.' That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.

My life has always somehow been played out in a minor key, unresolved. Art somehow resolves things for me.

There's this idea that many of the attitudes and personality developments in black folks in the diaspora are a consequence of this unresolved trauma. There have been attempts by black artists to try and figure out how to represent that in some kind of way.

I grew up in the early '60s, and there was a lot of civil rights, a lot of unrest in our country.

Economic inequality is a corrosive force that undermines economic growth, puts a brake on the fight against poverty, and sparks social unrest.

Toward the end of the '90s, it got pretty rough for me - a lot of emotional unrest and problems with my relationships. That affected my career.

I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.

Around 10, I got chubby. I knew I'd crossed a line when the only pants that fit were from the 'Junior Plenty' line at JC Penny. My parents had split up, my mom was going through a dark time, and my brother and I were getting bullied in our new neighborhood. Life was big and unsafe.

As a Black man, you are living in a place and you are constantly unsafe. And we go to these bastions of safety: Harlem, you can call that a haven; the South Side of Chicago, you can call that haven; Detroit, you can call that haven.