Quotes About Struggle

I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

There are limits, you know. A person can only be pressed so far until they crumble.

We find for a moment, here and there, those amazing times where the companionship of another resists the aloneness. It can be as simple as the grace note of a stranger holding the door for you. Or it can be as deep and complex as the bond of a soul mate who understands every nuance of your struggle with the world and gives you complete love of mind and body. Yet, in the end we're still alone.

we cannot escape the things we must face.

2. What, exactly, are you supposed to do when your mom not only doesn't make everything better (like she did, effortlessly, for the first fourteen and a half years of your life), but also actually now makes things worse (and maybe even much worse)?

By giving up the feminine as an identity, the feminist simultaneously undermines the masculine as well. Masculine identity depends on its feminine counterpart that affirms it as its complementary other. Without this support, masculine identity collapses. This is why the feminist struggle against feminine identity Beauvoir advocates is a battle against patriarchy.

The fight against colonialism is a fight to recognize the universal equality and freedom that colonialism renders invisible. It is not a fight to preserve the particularity of a local culture that European colonialism wiped out.

If we completely divorce epistemology from politics, we lose sight of the nature of the political opposition. If we think about the opposition between Right and Left as the opposition between particular and universal, it is clear that the struggle is epistemological as much as it is political.

Rather than the death that occurs at the end of life, the death drive comes out of a death that occurs within life.

We looked like dogs chasing cars in trafic

It's weird when you wake of from a bad dream and everything is still bad.

Some people get more of a chance to show who they are. Other people never get the chance.

Was it the weakness of a man that made him want to ignore the darker side of his fellow human beings?

Light skin gives me such privileges that my complaints are not worthy. I'm not "positive" enough. Not "black" enough. I'm not a "real" black person. Worst of all are the terrible choices - the possibility of losing connections to those I love, betraying them, those who have done terrible things but at the same time have had to survive within the context of racism. Whose side am I on?

Sometimes memory is like a dream. The worst nightmares are forgotten. Sometimes living is a nightmare. Just getting up, meeting your neighbors, and walking down the street.

My Father Still Sleeping After Surgery In spite of himself, my father loved me. In spite of the hands that beat me, in spite of the mouth that kept silent, in spite of the face that turned cruel as a gold Chinese king, he could not control the love that came out of him. The body is monumental, a colossus through which he breathes. His hands crawl over his stomach jerkily as sand crabs on five legs; he makes a fist like the fist of a newborn.

This is an act of destruction of the self, an undoing of the self's protection. Over and over I face the wall, the way in which I must confront my own complicity. Even the smallest fragment is a great victory.

One of the characteristics of the mind is that it is always expecting something, chasing after something it wants or retreating from or resisting something is doesn't want.

Todas as famílias felizes se parecem, cada família infeliz é infeliz à sua maneira.

Het hinderde me dat hij zijn klaarheid en rust alweer had teruggewonnen terwijl er in mij nog zoveel ergernis was.

Isso não é amor. Eu já estive apaixonado, mas isso não é a mesma coisa. Não se trata de um sentimento meu, mas de uma força exterior que se apoderou de mim. Veja, eu fugi porque decidi que tal coisa não poderia acontecer, entende, como uma felicidade que não pode existir na terra; mas lutei contra mim mesmo e vejo que sem isso não existe vida.

Si tout le monde ne se battait que par conviction il n'y aurait pas de guerre (Guerre et Paix, livre premier, 1ère partie, ch. VI)

I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.