Quotes About Struggle

suit, Quentin knew he wasn't happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do.

Now he had answers, but they weren't doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren't making things simpler or easier. They weren't helping.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be interested in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That's not love, that's hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.

Trees were fucking mental in a fight, it turned out.

You wish to be a hero, but you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose,

Loyal prophets of an indifferent god" (on the topic of alcoholics, p.222)

I got my hearts desire, he thought, and there my troubles began.

He did not want to be original; he made superhuman efforts to be like everybody else: but there is no escaping one's destiny.

More striking still, a broken man is generally deprived of everything except the ability to acknowledge and feel his position.

Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour, - this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself - the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job.

Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.

Kada bi Darvin video u životu ono što je video Dostojevski, on ne bi govorio o zakonu samoodržanja nego o zakonu samouništenja.

Sempre a mesma coisa. Ora uma gota de esperança que cintila, depois um mar de desespero que se desencadeia, e sempre a dor, sempre a dor, sempre o desespero, sempre a mesma coisa.

Egli la guardava, come l'uomo guarda il fiore da lui strappato e appassito, in cui riconosce con difficoltà la bellezza per la quale l'ha strappato e rovinato.

I ask only one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now; but if even that is impossible, command me to disappear and I will do it. -Vronsky

In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great.

Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.

Maybe the greatness we heard in [Richard Manuel]'s voice, that catch in it, came from all that pain. To this day, we don't really know.

I am a Beginner. What the others are I don't really know. All I know is I am wiped out every six months or so. I die. I have died hundreds and hundreds of times. It is always the same death. I do not know what dies. Why must I always begin again and again – always the same high hopes, the identical death?

My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It's a great job. Naturally I'm starving to death

Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

There is only one way fit for a man -- Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.