Quotes About Struggle

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

I had to walk away from America, and say goodbye to the biggest part of my career, because I knew otherwise my demons would get the better of me.

My entire life, nothing's been easy. This is the way it ought to be.

I think the single most important, fascinating, and complex aspect of human nature is that we all know, deep down, that we are not what we ought to be - or as John Doe says in 'Seven,' 'We are not what was intended.'

I've worked with a lot of great, glamorous girls in movies and the theater. They would always give their last ounce to get where they wanted to be.

This first-generation narrative keeps happening over and over and over again, whether it was Irish or Jewish or our community, South Asians, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. We've all gone through this sort of bridge, and it will continue to happen.

One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.

We've got to help our community out. We've got to help Baltimore out, because it's a lot of things that have been handed down in our society that we're dealing with.

We need to look marginalized people in our community in the eye and listen to their stories of struggle, heartache and impossibility.

I just remember the feeling of being dropped from Island and having our hearts broken. Because we were given a chance to put out an album to the world. We got the chance for people to know who we were. We wanted to make our dreams come true and do hip-hop for a living, but we didn't do it right.

We all have challenging family relationships, and trying to balance that between our dreams and what we feel compelled to do is, I think, a challenge that's easily relatable.

My motivation is, in part, a bit of angst that comes from feeling like I don't belong, that our generation doesn't belong.

I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.

L.A. is a big city that has a lot of music in it but is not necessarily known for it. A lot of musicians got lost in that. You can make a living; you can gig a lot within the city and never get out of it. That was something that me and my friends, our generation, were afraid of happening to us.

Cancer is something that, tragically, affects almost all of our lives.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

We all have human emotions that rob our lives.

Being political is an integral part of being Iranian. Our lives are defined by politics.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we're complicated, that we are indeed messy, that we do our best with what we've been given. We come into the world exactly like you. It's just that there are circumstances in the culture that are dictated and put on our lives that we have to fight against.

That Days of Our Lives thing for a week nearly killed me.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

In our lives, we have good things and bad things, happiness and pain.

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?