Quotes About Struggle

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.

Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable, though everything depends on it—the world is balanced on it like a ball on a seal's nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed, abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon which confers magical powers upon its possessor; consequently this muscleless inchworm must try to swagger through temples and pull apart thighs like the hairiest Samson, the mightiest ram.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time.

He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn't seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn't been coined yet.

Hovington cowered on the porch alternately praying and swearing in a desperate attempt to cover all the bases.

It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.

You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.

He was used to shotgun shacks with cracks you could have thrown a good-sized housecat through and floors through whose cracks a man could watch his chickens scratching for worms, if he was lucky enough to possess any chickens.

I've been through hell and just barely got scorched.

Then the babies started comin, the old man went on. They never heard of rubbers, I reckon, or maybe they figured that that would be cheatin. One of the youngest of them girls told me one time, she was drinkin a little or she never would have told it, she said her sisters would bury them babies in widemouth Mason fruit jars.

Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through tough times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard.

Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread.

Plants grow most in the darkest hours preceding dawn; so do human souls. Nature always pays for a brave fight. Sometimes she pays in strengthened moral muscle, sometimes in deepened spiritual insight, sometimes in a broadening, mellowing, sweetening of the fibres of character,—but she always pays.

The power of self-control is one of the great qualities that differentiates man from the lower animals. He is the only animal capable of a moral struggle or a moral conquest.

Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.

Hell of a world we live in, huh? (...) But it could be worse, huh?" "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.

Why did she thus obstinately cling to an ill-starred, unhappy person?

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.