Quotes About Struggle

We should all be merely animals. As humans, there are miseries nothing can put us out of.

What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

hit a man in the face long enough and he turns for help to his racial memory and tribal gods.

If God is never happy what chance of happiness is there for us?

Kumar was a man who felt in the end he had lost everything, even his Englishness, and could then only meet every situation—even the most painful—in silence, in the hope that out of it he would dredge back up some self-respect.

love, as their parents knew, was not enough. Hunger and poverty could never be reduced by love alone.

the exercise of authority was not an easy business, especially if those who exercised it no longer felt they had heaven on their side. That

the one thing to which the human spirit could always accommodate itself was chaos and misfortune.

I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told, and I have squandered my resistance, for a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises. All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest...la-la-la-la-la-la-la-lala-la-la-la-la...

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's.

Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings.

city of twenty-three million. Half of this huge number of chilangos—as the Mexico City dwellers call themselves—are classified as enduring dire poverty, many enjoying extreme wealth, and an estimated fifteen thousand children live on the street.

Normal, nice people don't become writers.

What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things-an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher.

I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.

One obvious answer is that the risks and privations in Mexico are much worse that those endured in a border crossing.

A recent survey concluded that 55.3 million Mexicans can be described as poor or destitute, this in a population of 127 million.

What I had learned on the border from the mothers intending to cross was not that they wished to make a new life in the States, but that they hoped, as a solution, to make enough money to keep their family together in Mexico.

But hope and determination and a willingness to take risks are not enough to overcome the curse of bad government or the hostility of the everyday, the warding off of evil.

another wildly gesturing to her comatose baby and pleading for help

Lying on a flat, sun-heated rock to get my breath, procrastinating, I soon abandoned my effort to get to the top of Cerro Potosí.

Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This - London - was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was still yet unsure of my lines.

a laboratory of social and economic horror.

saw that a lack of money was not the problem in this country—but it seldom is in the hellholes of the world.