Quotes About Struggle

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

They were prisoners, trapped by old ways of life, jailed within the imperial palace. He was no more free than she was. Yet only she could do what she would. If she said she would be Empress, then none could hold her back.

Why must this happen to me?" To this there could be no answer and there was none. When I knew at last that there could never be an answer, my own resolve shaped into the determination to make meaning out of the meaningless, and so provide the answer, though it was of my own making.

His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.

Had she not created even him? Perhaps for that he never forgave her, but hated her and fought her secretly, and dominated her and oppressed her and kept her locked in houses and her feet bound and her waist tied, and forbade her wages and skills and learning, and widowed her when he was dead, and burned her sometimes to ashes, pretending that it was her faithfulness that did it.

But is strength comfort for a woman?

In a strange and ominous way the fate of women everywhere in the world is linked with the trend toward fascism. To delay might mean to be compelled to silence.

rulers anywhere are always the first to fly, and the people must stay behind to be steadfast. And the noise of the battle grew more strong, hour by hour.

But O-Lan returned to the beating of his clothes and when tears dropped slowly and heavily from her eyes she did not put up her hand to wipe them away; only she beat the more steadily with her wooden stick upon the clothes spread over the stone.

wept in the way that women do when their hearts are too full with sorrow of their life and spilled and running over and they care no more except they must be eased somehow because all of life is too heavy for them.

Day by day beneath the opulence of this city Wang Lung lived in the foundations of poverty upon which it was laid.

He had collected from every place where he had hid his little stores of gain and he had borrowed all he could, and he could not even have had this except by bitter, frugal living.

You ought to hate him, Yuan! Have you not heard what white men have done to our country, and how they hold us hard as any prisoners with their cruel, unjust treaties?

Déjame estar triste, es la única forma que conozco de estrujar la felicidad para que después no me pene.

En fin, en este país se hace cada día más difícil sobrevivir al modelito. La globa la lleva, los pobres arrastran la bolsa del pan sin pan.

So lonely, so trapped within his own cocoon that he can't even cry without a spectator to appreciate the effort it takes to shed a tear onstage.

Y es que el invierno, la estación más desnuda del año, revela las carencias y pesares de un país que creyó haber superado la fonola tercermundista, un país narciso que se mira la nariz en los espejos de los edificios, un país que se piensa modelo de triunfo, y al menor desastre, al menor descuido, la indomable naturaleza manda guarda abajo el encatrado del éxito.

It just broke her heart to hear the sobs of those women who dug around in the rubble, dripping wet from the police water cannons, asking for news of their loved ones everywhere, knocking again and again on metal doors that never opened, trampled by blasts of water in front of the Ministry of Justice, chaining themselves to lampposts with torn stockings, disheveled, clutching their chests so the filthy water wouldn't tear away the photograph they wore over their hearts.

Siempre fue así, suspiró rendida, pan para hoy y hambre para mañana, tan pronto creía tener algo y la vida se lo quitaba de un arañazo.

I'd believed I could keep out the tales and the toys but had failed on both counts.

Infertility had rocked me to my core.

I understood that impulse. I felt so broken, my well-being so battered- who was going to give me an Rx for that?

Some chains are the result of things done to us. Some chains are the result of what we needed that we did not have. Although many are due to our own choices, there is hope. - Peggy Park

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.