Quotes About Struggle

We're like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other's hands and missing every time. Meanwhile the stage crew has gathered below us and begun to roll up the safety net.

Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family's asshole.

Then one day you wake up normal, restored to health—a miracle. At first you're incredibly grateful—your appetite's back, and your energy level. There's a bit of you, though, that misses the razor's edge, the terrible thrill that at any moment you might lose control fo yourself and finally know what total disgrace feels like.

inhabited by hopeless, motor-mouthed simpletons, drifting from a bad place to somewhere even worse. If you're lucky, people on the bus will wake you in order to borrow a cigarette. The man occupying the window seat is likely to introduce himself with the line "What the hell are you staring at?

Like many good biography subjects, she became a mess toward the end of her life.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It's also harder to source...

I read yesterday that when starved for food, the humpback cricket will chew off its own legs. If they regenerated this might be a half-decent idea, but they don't. So it eats its legs, and, unable to escape danger, it promptly gets eaten itself. That so seems like something I would do.

Why aren't you stronger? I wanted to ask. I mean, really. Can't you just try harder? Of course, I was drunk too, so what could I say?

I felt my eyes tear up, and as my vision blurred I considered all the people who had fought against this and thought, Take that, assholes.

I can see him doing the same thing I am, trying to make some sort of connection. We're like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other's hands and missing every time.

As it was, 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.

My argument was an old and stodgy one: the best thing you can do for the poor is avoid joining their ranks, thus competing with them for limited goods and services.

Usually when I was forced to compete, it was my tactic to simply give up. To try in any way was to announce your ambition, which only made you more vulnerable. The person who wanted to win but failed was a loser, while the person who didn't really care was just a weirdo—a title I had learned to live with.

It made me realise that nothing comes easy; nothing is given to you. In Africa I realised you have to make things happen for yourself.

One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that "tortured" souls sometimes produce great work.

Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he'd have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I've ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that's the most radical contradiction of ourselves.

What if America isn't really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it's the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?

What, you finally ask yourself, do I do now? Your entire recovery—all that passes for drug treatment in this country—has been about defining what you don't want to be, what you fear and dread and need to avoid.

maybe people gave God too many alls to juggle.

They have me singing in a reformatory. My singing would be enough to get me in, but I'd never be able to sing my way out.

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.' 

A veces la grandeza la lleva el perdedor y la ignominia es de quien primero llegó.

La victoria separa más que la derrota.

La vida carecía de sentido y saberlo me atosigaba como a cualquier vecino de un callejón sin salida.