Quotes About Struggle

My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end. She did not know what else to do.

His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin's Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.

Poor wretched beasts (said he) Why gave we you t'a mortall king? De dumty dumty dum De dumty dumty dumty dum de dumty dumty dum? De dumty dumty dumty dum de dumty dumty dum? Of all the miserable'st things that breathe and creepe on earth, No one more wretched is then man. And for your deathless birth, Hector must faile to make you prise

He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.

Lily had lived in fear before she knew why she was afraid. She'd grown up knowing that people hated her. Perfectly ordinary people, the kind of adults who ought to be helping her to cross the road, hated Lily and wanted her gone. That was the climate of her childhood.

These two would never understand each other. I was the only link between them and each of them tugged on it hard in the hope that the other would let go.

No one makes a better enemy than a man who has had to beg for your help.

They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

You're trapped both ways. You do as you are told and you do things that you think will make you big, but all the time you're shrinking.

I cry because I don't have the upper-arm strength to flatiron my hair. I

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.

I'm no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing.

Oh God, what's wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out?

Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly.

where you swallowed a terrible silence.

my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.

The beginner will cling and cling to her thin first draft. She clings to the coast and will strike out into the ocean only under extreme duress

these boys chipping at the rigidities of social deference, in search of a place, a voice. In Spain too the old power seemed to be dying, but slowly and viciously and, as it turned out, not yet. Nor would it depart in the way scripted by Republican reformers, and not before in its passing it claimed from that generation a barbaric tribute, exacted in the coin of "national cleansing

It is no wonder that so many children preferred life on the streets, for street children forced into petty theft and prostitution were also a singular phenomenon of 1940s Spain

this was a "dirty war" and it "disappeared" some 30,000 people during the war of 1936–39.

requetés (the Carlist militia)

there are some striking similarities with the post-Soviet experience where a heterogeneously configured and relatively marginal civic memory movement also struggles against a state that neither properly recognizes, still less commemorates the unlawfully murdered.3

long, slow and painful recuperation of Republican history and memory

the death squads came, by night to "take out" of gaol in the deadly sacas, exactly the same form of extrajudicial execution that ended the lives of her two brothers and of tens of thousands of others across Spain.