Quotes About Struggle

Things don't like me. Furniture purposely sticks out its leg for me. A polished corner once literally bit me. My blanket and I have always had a complicated relationship. Soup served to me never cools. Any little thing—a coin or a cuff link—that falls off the table usually rolls away under furniture that's hard to move. I crawl across the floor and lifting my head I see the sideboard laughing.)

What could be poetic in a pigsty enveloped in so many curses?

I found that the Russians had destroyed much of their country trying to keep up with the United States in their arms race.

People aren't poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they're poor.

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless." "I

oh he loves her, just as the English loved India & Africa & Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly. but maybe it is just the scenery that is wrong. maybe nothing that happens on stolen ground can expect a happy ending.

progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

I was fourteen: the world was pain.

Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose.

Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

It seems to me, said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.

She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.

you're lucky that you find life so easy, Felix. You're lucky that you're happy, that you know how to be happy, that you're a good person- and you want everyone to be happy and good because you are, and to find things easy because you do. Do it ever occur to you some people might not find life as easy to live as you do?

There are so many different ways to be poor

Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness.

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie's pinball trick. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the place be neutral, but the messenger who takes you to the place, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left…

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

New York just expects so much from a girl—acts like it can't stand even the idea of a wasted talent or opportunity. . . . Rome says: enjoy me. London: survive me. New York: gimme all you got. What a thrilling proposition! The chance to be "all that you might be." Such a thrill—until it becomes a burden.

The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost.

when all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.