Quotes About Struggle

Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned.

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

They said, This might look like a war between men and women, but what this really is is the last siege of a ruling class. See Brett up there making that little bitch-baby face? See that? That's the face a baby makes when you try to take his rattle way. We've had many, many babies so we're familiar. America being the rattle in this analogy. He thinks he deserves to do whatever he wants with that rattle, and women are simply a subclause in that arrangement

Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.

A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end - he will kill. Make no mistake. He won't let the new order roll over him without a struggle.

to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round.

We are split people.

But equally you can't fight for a freedom you've forgotten how to identify.

the feeling I had of moving into somebody else's broken ambition.

I am not as ingenious as these people. 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.

When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.

Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending.

We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One

She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I'll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time

To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And

I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said.

Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.

Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, "It's two o'clock in the afternoon!" and so we put down our glasses and sigh.

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.

It's a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers---women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.

It's hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of bed in the morning.