Quotes About Struggle

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.

I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn't want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.

At what point had I realized that class couldn't save you, that addiction or mental illness didn't care whether you'd taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?

True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It's remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I'd been slammed into a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist-show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election.

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. Sometime me cry alone at night. That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.

If I'd been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.

We're like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other's hands and missing every time

At what point had I realized that class couldn't save you, that addiction or mental illness didn't care whether you'd taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?

Wants to set the world on fire, and if it can't happen by tomorrow morning at nine a.m., then life's just unfair and hardly worth living.

The crummy part of swimming is that while you're doing it you can't really see much: the bottom of the pool, certainly, a smudged and fleeting bit of the outside world as you turn your head to breathe. But you can't pick things out – a man's face, for example, watching from the sidelines when, for the first time in your life, you pull ahead and win.

I looked from face to face, exaggerating flaws and reminding myself that these boys did not like me. The hope was that I might crush any surviving atom attraction, but as has been the case for my entire life, the more someone dislikes me the more attractive he becomes.

Teaching you is like having a cesarean section every day of the week.

all had the air of a second home, one devoted to leisure rather than struggle.

I once considered suing Farrah Fawcett for invasion of privacy. Hardly a day passed when I didn't see her on a magazine cover, an ad, a poster. She was destroying my life, but now she's OK.

started feeling real sorry for everybody, even though they were screaming and acting silly. I thought about how much work it was to have fun, and how brave we all were for going to the trouble, since the easiest thing would be to just moan and cry and bite the walls, because we're all going to die anyway, sooner or later. Isn't that sad? I saw how every human life is a story, and the story always ends badly.

In my experience, it was hard to write without your preferred tools, but impossible to write without a cigarette.

When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there's a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.

You'd think my mother could have seen the difference between the sunny, likable her and the dark one who'd call late at night. I could hear the ice cubes in her glass rushing forth whenever she took a sip. In my youth, when she'd join my father for a drink after work—"Just one, I have to get dinner on the table"—that was a happy sound. Now it was like a trigger being cocked.

I wouldn't know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum but because I was gay.