Quotes About Struggle

Man fears the darkness, and so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire. He creates life by diminishing the Darkness.

I'm often told that those who don't like themselves set high expectations for themselves, but ? think people who say that don't really understand how painful it is.

Love is so great... So why does it have to go so wrong?

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

All men have an instinct for conflict at least, all healthy men.

As if she had summoned them, a flurry of stones flew out of the darkness, striking his mail, pinging off his helm. One hit his unprotected leg and he yelped and clutched it. That was a mistake. The second barrage was entirely directed at his legs.

For better or worse, she was the lady Soraya. And the lady Soraya would never dream of missing the warm bulk of Casia's body between her and the hearth, or the comforting drone of Ludo's snores. Or the wry laughter of a slave... a slave, for Azura's sake! The lady Soraya needed no one. The lady Soraya cried herself to sleep.

Things that other people do, or that happen to people you love, are some of the things you can't fight.

But at what price? What would she have to block out, just to go from one day to the next? You'll never understand the choice I've had to make. Either way, her life is over. Living like that; or prison. It's the end. Either one will break her.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. —George Eliot

It's a panic attack, he told himself. That's all it is. But knowing that fact and somehow separating himself from the tentacles of fear and dread were different things.

Rich was beginning to see how the world worked against virtually all women, the privileged and the unprivileged, and her increasing awareness of all the ways she was being held back fueled her righteous indignation.

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

Everybody wants something, if only for the pain to stop.

In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck." 472

92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.

Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.

So now get up.' Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

You . . . person," he says; and again, "you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.

Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth.

I believe, but I do not believe enough.