Quotes About Struggle

Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world was falling apart.

My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

I don't know when my parents began their war against each other – but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children.

We Shall Overcome" by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

I'm not mentally ill," she insisted, fidgeting in her chair. "I'm just very neurotic and I'm always falling in love with assholes.

Though I've never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching.

šeima - pernelyg drausminga armija, kad užjaust? dezertyrus.

They love their families with their hearts and souls and they wage war against them to prove it.

Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life.

I wish I had no history to report. I've pretended for so long that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out.

As I applauded, I knew that it would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

As a teacher, I had been a happy man. Now, I was only a diminished one.

In the fantasy of the races conceived in my mind, all blacks were noble people who had struggled against a repressive social order for years and who were finally reaping the tangible rewards of this struggle. All whites, especially myself, were guilty of heinous, extraordinarily brutal crimes against humanity.

I saw the necessity of living and accepting bullcrap in my midst. It was everywhere. In teachers' manuals, in the platitudes muttered by educators, in school boards, in the community, and most significantly, in myself.

You are just lazy, lazy, and lazy people just can't get ahead in life. Of course some of you are even retarded, and that is even worse than being lazy. But we know you can't help being retarded.

to worry about. But that's not how it works. Pain doesn't travel in straight lines. It circles back around and comes up behind you. It's the circles that kill you.

I realized that words were sometimes nothing more than notes you wrote to your deepest self as you fought to articulate the splendor and the magic and the ineluctable sense of loss that you felt in the swift, disturbing hours.

They strode with purpose, armed with resolution, whereas everything I did seemed insubstantial and forced. I longed for engagement, intrusion, and a little more Mardi Gras than Lent in my life.

Throughout the following era, while we struggled with our institutions, with one another, and with our own moral flaws, one of the things that kept many of us going was a sense of privilege. Only the very fortunate get to struggle. Only the living may improve.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage. – Alexander Theroux