Quotes About Struggle

Just in case you haven't been told yet, life is not fair. It's not fair that birds eat worms, but they do!

Angry people may appear strong, willful, or certain, but be assured that beneath the veneer are fear and loneliness and insecurity and pain. Especially, there is pain.

I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble was, it was my own.

Each scene in a story is a battle, and the story entire is a war.

For unfortunately, simplicity is a state which is mostly achieved only through great difficulty, or the complicity of others.

In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form -- words -- to the ineffable.

Yet the greater the turmoil inside him, the more the revelations responded to it. It was as though the Quranic voice was able to see deep inside him and address questions he was barely aware he was asking.

Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it.

Forty, that is, gives a new lease on life, and this is how the number consistently appears in the sacred books that came out of the Middle East. The duration of the great flood waited out in Noah's ark, the years of Israelite wandering in the desert after the exodus, the nights Moses spent on Mount Sinai, the days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness—all forty, the number signifying a time of struggle and displacement in preparation for a new beginning

you took my son away! Do you how hard it was for me to get him to go to school and graduate

All artists are terribly insecure people. They are desperate to be noticed.

One of my hardest moments was unveiling

won't be easy to get to," he muttered, his own voice stark against the silence. "Not easy at all." The man lived in a fortress of

France went to a Dr. Nancy Peters, and as part of her therapy she kept a notebook in which she grappled with her own various family dynamics. She also wrote about Louise, whom she described as "the firebrand, the disturber, the quicksilver, ranting or magnificent, at my side." In the same entry, she wrote, "I have to learn to fight, because I want to keep Louise.

Always there are walls, Rachael, she persisted. Walls that block our path. Too high, too hard. We stop to rest, to gather strength, and before we know it we have lived whole lives in their shade. In time, we cease to even see them there, casting their long shadows, blocking our path. We cease to yearn for the other side.

Nothing is won without sacrifice.

Oh, God!' he groaned. 'God help me!

It was one of those situations in which Mr Teal habitually felt himself drowning in the turgid waters of an unfathomable Weltschmerz. He glowered at Simon

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Every day I saw others like me in this city—enough of us to populate our own town. But we only acknowledged each other with a furtive glance, fearful of calling attention to ourselves. Being alone in public was painful enough; two could find themselves smack in the center of an unbearable sideshow. We didn't seem to have any of our own places to gather in community, to immerse ourselves in our own ways and our own languages.

I kept yelling at them that you were a human being, that you mattered, and it was like they weren't even listening to me. I couldn't do anything to help you and I couldn't make them take care of you the way I wanted, you know?" I nodded. I did know. And now I knew that Duffy did too.

That's when I began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home.

When I was really small I thought I'd do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn't want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.

It's a beauty one isn't born with, but must fight to construct at great sacrifice.