Quotes About Struggle

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

Queer, how her own desperate need of light seemed to throw such brilliance over the affairs of the members of her family. She carried her need like a many-batteried pocket spotlight, illuminating emotional corners in other people, but she walked in darkness behind it. Her wrist wouldn't bend to turn it on herself.

Perhaps effort doesn't matter, it isn't what ensures survival.

I suppose," says Jeremy, "what I don't like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine." Just like us, thinks Harriet.

It's so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices.

Sometimes life seems very unfair.

It's so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices. It's hopeless. She might as well be one of those gannets, tossed about by the gusts of wind that drive up from the Atlantic.

We would never learn to be patient if there were only joy in the world.

I want to warn twentysomething women that the old bargain has not changed all that much. You can only have it all if you do it all.

We creep closer to equality, before something drags us back. Misogyny mutates. Sexism and feminism are like bacteria and antibiotics; the latter forces the former to evolve. As soon as one argument against women's rights becomes useless, another takes its place.

The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren't White's, but I was running just the same.

He looks at Rao. Turns in his seat and looks. Sunil Rao, bane of Adam's career, world saver, royal pain in the ass, and genuinely the love of Adam's life.

for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.

For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal.

I knew I wasn't mad mad because I'd seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous.

The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around.

It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with. There was no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either. So it grabbed anything it could. It was desperate, and it read off the world wrong.

He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. He'd come home from work

my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair.

Sometimes when light dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.