Quotes About Struggle

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

I am a giant squid of anger.

I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.

This, I thought, is what is meant by "thy will be done" in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.

Grandpa's farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa's father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn't have it at all.

But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can't bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.

I knew he that he didn't have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it. It was turning fast. To slow it down or stop it and come to a place that was moving with the motion only of time and loss and slow grief was more, that day, than he could imagine. I knew too that it was more than he could bear.

If I could have found in my mind a plain and simple way to be right, that would have been something. I would have been changed in another way, and my life ever afterward would have been different. But having reached the crisis—the crossroad, so to speak—I failed. I didn't have at all the feeling of being right.

However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here; nights of sound sleep and good dreams and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. but I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

you're too pretty for your own good, maybe. It could get you an early start on a miserable life.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

History goes blind and in darkness, neither sees nor is seen, nor is known except as a carrion marked with unintelligible wounds; dragging its dead body, living, yet to be born, it moves heavily to its glories. It tramples the little towns, forgets their names.

As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.

Over the years he seemed to have shrunk, trying to make himself invisible to Ivy, or maybe to God.

A hood is far from an ideal garment to wear in a fistfight.

The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it.

But all those who were there, if they had lived past childhood, had twice in this world, first and last, been as helpless as a little child.

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness--the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.

I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

But there was no final firestorm, just a long night of negotiations where we tried to get our old selves back, to disown who we'd been for the past three months, because we'd been the wrong people all along.