Quotes About Struggle

He is a true casualty of battle. There's not a physical scar, but look at the man's heart, and his head, and there are scars galore.

Everywhere on this day, the after-war continues, as eternally as war itself

Congratulations for conquering PTSD. And now you're fucked.

I was a normal guy who got sent to Iraq and became crazy, so they sent me back to America to become sane, and now it's America that's driving me crazy.

impotency; many developed

On the outside, I appeared in grand shape that season. I was young and in love with a fabulous girl, hanging out at a beautiful, hip spot with true friends. But inside things were fraying and beginning to fragment. A seed of unrest lay behind my smile.

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. (on the wall of a bedroom at a recovery house for alcoholics and drug addicts)

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

La realidad es para la gente que no puede dominar las drogas.

The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. —David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

every failure is also a victory.