Quotes About Struggle

Dance is a tough life (and a tougher way to make a living). Choreography is even more brutal because there is no way to carry our history forward. Our creations disappear the moment we finish performing them. It's tough to preserve a legacy, create a history for yourself and others. But I put all that aside and pursued my gut instinct anyway. I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice.

there's one thing you'll never be delivered from. It's a ten-letter word called temptation!

I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me… but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

we steady thud of wind with lungs that empty moon, fill it back up with shine, feed my feet to pig iron anklets biting flesh where i am link. i will break. bleed, crack. shatter. crush. i'ma smash outta this choir, come up gasping new breath, my name burned clean, made mine

How the Other Half Lives

Everyone can relate to love, hurt, pain, learning how to forgive, needing to get over, needing the power of God in their life.

People always try to do the right thing..after they've tried everything else.

I got 27 people livin in my head and all of them was about to beat the heck out of you for doin that..

There will be rough nights but joy really does come in the morning.

The truth is I had to imagine myself in a better place," I explained. "Because sometimes the nights got so cold and the days

so hard, if I didn't dream of better times, I wouldn't have made it.

If God can bring me out of poverty and despair and place me right in the middle of the life I'd always imagined, he can do the same for anyone. And that includes you.

When I was twenty years old and putting on my first play in Birmingham, Alabama, I had to use my mother's credit card to rent a van to get there. The bill was around three hundred dollars. But the show didn't make any money, and when I came home I had to tell her I couldn't pay for the rental.

What I know about the Bible is this: Those whom God helped to ascend to a higher place were all flawed individuals, except for

He'd stomp through the house in his heavy work boots, yelling about everything we were doing wrong. If anything got in his path, he would explode and his fists would fly. Almost in a supernatural way, his anger would turn his brown eyes into an electric green, and when that happened I knew the worst was still to come. This was our hell on earth, and Mamma and I were burning in its flames.

get through the spring, summer, and autumn living paycheck to paycheck, but during the chilly months of winter, the money ran out and I couldn't pay my rent. The unthinkable happened. I became homeless. I'd sleep in my car and try to keep warm by running the heater or wrapping myself in a quilt Aunt Mae had given me. If I had some cash, I'd crash in a pay-by-the-week hotel room.

Emmitt spat back, "Girl, I wasn't doing nothing but lying to you. I ain't got no damn ranch. That ain't even my car. I just test-drive them on the weekends." He laughed ruefully. "I'm sitting here trying to find someone who'll give us a place to stay.

At eighteen years old, she found herself pregnant with my sister, and at nineteen pregnant again with my other sister. The abuse, beating, yelling, and belittling never stopped. At twenty-four years, she was pregnant again, and there I was, born into it.

I remember one really horrible fight when he was tearing into my mother—and then he came after me with a fury I had never seen before. I was beaten bloody that night.

energy, all your hopes—into a dream, then meeting the hard knocks of failure over and over again, falling down and getting up…having to push yourself up to rise and try again for seven long years.

payment and money that should have gone to my apartment, and rented the 14th Street Playhouse in downtown Atlanta. I hired actors, built scenery, and rented props. I did the whole nine yards on my own, spending all I had to my name.

Every year for five years I spent every cent I had on I Know I've Been Changed, putting it on in different cities and in different theaters. Every single show—every one—failed. The financial failure and the heartbreak tore at my faith. Yet something kept the dream alive in my mind and in my heart and so I kept going, kept hoping, until finally, in 1998, I'd

night I'd ever felt in Atlanta. And the heat was out in the theater. I was sitting in the dressing room, angry, frustrated, and feeling empty and hopeless. I was so agitated with disappointment that I couldn't sit still. I stood up and started pacing back and forth and speaking out loud to God. "You bring me out to these moments and you never see me through. What's going on?

Emmitt's cruel actions, his impatience, disrespect, uncontrollable anger, and violence, taught me all the ways I didn't want to be like him. My father stomped through our house, shooting his ugly, bone-chilling stare in my direction and sneering, "There's that little son of a bitch. Look at that jackass.