Quotes About Struggle

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

You can't do it alone, that's the thing. You have to remember there are other people out there who have gone through it, who know what you're going through.

The girl was about to cry, which reminded me of the grown woman I had just left on the sidewalk also near tears. Jesus, there was no escaping them.

You cannot blame the Sahara alone for the troubles. But you should also not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.

Life is unbearably perverse; that which we most seek to avoid always becomes unavoidable.

There I sat, in the wreckage of my apartment, in the wreckage of my life – no love, no prospects, a gnawing sense of existential futility along with the certainty that a better life was being lived by everyone else

Just then things weren't going so well in my life. My business was precariously perched on the brink of bankruptcy, my anemic love life was the stuff of a Sartre treatise – Being with Nothingness – my car could use a tune-up, my apartment could use a scrubbing, my body could use some exercise, though who would give it that was a mystery to me. I was too young to feel old, and yet there it was, the despair of middle age, hanging around my neck like a noose.

The campus was Disney-fascist, a relentlessly upbeat place to wither and die.

And he clutched it tight in his fist, as if it were his final, brightest hope in a world of tragic illusions.

It's not easy, that's all I can tell you. Living your own life is hard. It's easier just going along, doing what they tell you to do.

choke him. They filled him with their trial and

When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.

For poets the wages of sin are poverty.

But I'd come to a time when I couldn't deal with these broken things anymore. There were too many of them. I couldn't fix them. I didn't have the strength. I couldn't hold them in my mind. I didn't even want to know about them.

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the twentieth century.

He read about humanitys age-old racial struggles. Had it really been less than half a millennium since humans contrived gigantic, fatuous lies about each other simply because of pigment shades, and killed millions because they believed their own lies?

'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard, Master Harry—every man of every nation has done that—'tis the living up to it that's difficult.

There are few experiences in life as painful and brutal as the failure of a small business. For a small business conceived and nurtured by its owner is like a living, breathing child. Its loss is no less traumatic than losing a loved one.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.

People don't ever seem to relate that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

Coulda made something o' himself. But a luckless man. All his days a luckless man. The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic." The unintentional humour of her remark was like her natural appetite for life reasserting itself. Harkness couldn't stop smiling. It was as if Glasgow couldn't shut the wryness of its mouth even at the edge of the grave.

Laidlaw was reminded that he didn't want the heaven of the holy or the Utopia of the idealists. He wanted the scuffle of living now every day as well as he could manage without the exclusive air-conditioning of creeds and, after it, just the right to lie down with all those others who had settled for the same. It seemed to him the hardest thing to do.