Quotes About Struggle

why this world, which was so full of beauty and wonder, had to also be so full of horrors.

You know, son, I don't think there's such a thing as an easy life. There's always going to be hard work, and there will always be misfortunes we can't control lurking out at the edges - storms, sickness, wolves. But there is such a thing as a good life, and I think we have one here -Mr. Harrow

She could not understand why this world, which was so full of beauty and wonder, had to also be so full of horrors.

Somehow she had done wrong by trying to do right.

The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren't the master of yourself any-more. Anger is.

We are tanks and guns. We are force of history. We will crush them beneath our heels like bugs.

I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted

Writing it has been a way of coming to terms with the impact these years have had on my entire life.

It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

Life there was hard and it made people hard.

Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.

Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

Don't worry, God understands,' Mom said. 'He knows that your father is a cross we must bear.

Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't.

I told Mom that maybe I had made a terrible mistake, but mom said sometimes you have to get sicker before you can get better.

From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.

Sad state to spend your life in. Being afraid of your own self. Rex Walls

I was torturing the fire, giving it life, and snuffing it out.

You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies.

we fought a lot in welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; Maybe it was because life there was hard and it made the people hard...maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids.

One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

She kept saying that the flood was God's will and we had to submit to it. But I didn't see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail—the gumption to try to save ourselves—isn't that what he wanted us to do?