Quotes About Struggle

It's not that students don't get Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they 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 that horrific struggle.

The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?

How to keep the seductive ghost of bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back out and eating your heart raw and (if you're lucky) eliminating your map for good.

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying— are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

Existence and life break people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time.

Ten un padre cuyo propio padre perdió lo que estaba ahí. Ten un padre que cumplió su propia promesa y luego encontró una cosa tras otra y superó las expectativas de su propia promesa y no pareció estar mucho más feliz ni más seguro que su propio padre fracasado, dejándote en una especie de estado salvaje y de encrucijada de flujos con respecto al talento.

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.

then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you're in Denial about it being the Substance that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about -

When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,' John L. says; 'I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that's not livin that's a fuckin death-in-life.

Estas mañanas peores con suelos fríos y ventanas calientes y luz despiadada...con la certidumbre en el alma de que ese día no será atravesado sino más bien escalado verticalmente que cuando al final vaya a dormir será otra vez como si cayera desde algún sitio alto y escarpado.

That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don't, and but you can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and your face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while.

Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime.

the being struck dumb. It's like some combination of invisibility and being buried alive, in terms of the feeling. It's like being strangled somewhere deeper inside you than your neck.

There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volkmann's contracture 115 curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S's and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow's coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying 'Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he's just new is all'; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy's neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

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.

In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

It's unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry.

daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek—Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross—until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which

L'odio che provi a fine giornata per tutto il lavoro è semplicemente parte del lavoro

Le persone bruciate alla nascita, quelle colpite e offese oltre ogni giustizia, finiscono per ripiegarsi nel loro stesso fuoco, o per risorgere

masturbating but did not. He didn't reject the idea so much