Quotes About Struggle

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again.

Just when she'd got her head on straight, her body started falling apart.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.

I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.

Leonard's being up early constituted a new change in his sleeping patterns, was part of the former change in his sleeping patterns, or indicated a beneficial development. She didn't know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get off of. You can't get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though. Darlene, in The Marriage Plot

and left no doubt that Cecilia had done violence to herself.

We just want to live. If anyone would let us.

He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

I climbed the stairs and got back into bed, pulling a pillow over my face to block out the summer light. But there was no hiding from reality that morning.

I don't want to ruin your life, Leonard said in a gentler tone. You're not ruining it. The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off? He jabbed at his head with his index finger. It's cutting me up, and I can't turn it off. Madeleine, listen to me. Listen. I'm not going to get better.

As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet.

The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.

As meninas estavam enormes naqueles vestidos de cerimónia, construídos à volta de uma estrutura de arame. Tinham quilos e quilos de cabelo, bem presos, na cabeça. Embriagadas, beijando-nos, ou a desmaiar nas cadeiras, estavam destinadas ao ensino superior, aos maridos, à educação dos filhos, à infelicidade que dificilmente se percebia - enfim, à vida.

Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.

The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself.

La depresión no es algo de lo que uno se quita. No puedes desengancharte de la depresión. Depresión es como un moretón que nunca se te quita. Un moretón en la mente. Tienes que tener mucho cuidado de no tocarte donde duele. Pero está siempre ahí

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.

She'd always been a failed bohemian, anyway.

She didn't know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents' house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.

Buffeted but not broken.

it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.