Quotes About Struggle

For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke... They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside.

I will tell you something about stories. They aren't just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories.

He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him.

He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.

She marched along, wondering how it could be that some people had to work their fingers to the bone and risk their lives in order to make a living and others could just sail around in the lap of luxury.

Even evils are transitory. So where to battle?

The unbalanced are more at home with life's twists and turns.

[Domestic violence is] a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.

But I am clinically depressed and have an anxiety disorder, which interferes with things like studying and learning and breathing and living. He thinks it's something I can just turn off and on with willpower.

The line between reality and illusion is getting blurry. Sometimes I really do think everyone hates me. Sometimes the crazy is all I've got. My head's pounding again. I hate all this: the pathology and the defiance and the confusion about whether I'm getting better or worse. And yet it is so totally me. I know that none of it ends here tonight. Not by a long shot.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.

As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

the history of Christian attempts to discern the signs of the times makes discouraging reading. At

John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you.

Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.

We have achieved the most amazing things, a few million people opening up half a continent. But we have not yet found a Canadian soul except in time of war. (On lack of national identity)

The disagreements between Stalin and Trotsky were real to a certain extent, but they were grossly inflated by the struggle for personal power and never amounted to two independent and coherent theories.

A arte de sofrer é inconsciente... E é preciso fingir que se vive, é preciso.

How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.