Quotes About Struggle

We live our lives between magic and panic.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.

In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?

And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.

He calls his brother. it is the wrong brother from whom to seek consolation, but what can he do? When it comes to consolation it is always the wrong brother, the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wrong wife, which is why one must be content to console oneself and be strong and go on in life consoling others.

Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

No importa cuánto sepas, no importa cuánto pienses, no importa cuánto maquines, finjas y planees, no estás por encima del sexo. Es un juego muy arriesgado. Uno no tendría dos tercios de los problemas que tiene si no corriera el albur de la jodienda. El sexo es lo que desordena nuestras vidas normalmente ordenadas.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach-that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again.

Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...

they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful a novelist.

To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands." —p. 342

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time." He went on: "I can't face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can't do that anymore. --New York Times, 18 Nov. 2012

It's amazing how much punishment we can take.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.