Quotes About Struggle

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility. I'm damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that's damn big. But that's alright. I can do that.

We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,' the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. 'We want space and light.

Devils and Nazis don't work well together.

It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

This was the first time any adult had hit me. The window-cleaner winced with every strike. I felt better and worse that even a man such as he counted this punishment unfair. He did not intervene.

shit, shit, shit.

In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish—not to mention Nazis—so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.

He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.

Just once," he said with abrupt savagery, "in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it's supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.

Liberation was fucked up.

Godspit and shit, Jack, don't start with 'the limits of individual action' right now. I'm just tired. Sometimes, don't you sometimes wish you didn't care? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care." Fishday

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.

Objects foraged out of Nazis' quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.

Ilse Aichinger, "The Bound Man

Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

I didn't tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help.

Lenin] wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people 'influenced by the hopelessness of its situation' could be blamed for 'fling[ing] itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual'.

I always stayed. I can't say I chose to stay as I felt quite without traction, without capacity to find myself or anything.

You see what's going on," Dane said. Miserably he ran his hands over his head. "That is a picket line, and I am in trouble." "A picket? The cats and birds?" Dane nodded. "The familiars are on strike.

The Tattoo. You wouldn't say "charming" -- that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo's brutal enticement.

sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.

He who toils with pain will eat with pleasure.