Quotes About Struggle

The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe.

It just goes to show,' said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, "you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

But darling, I am clean. Two years clean." "Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills . . ." "I said I'm clean, not a bloody Mormon!

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

Maybe I have thought intellect more important than faith. And now it seems this final temptation has been put in front of me.

Do others have to lose so we can win?

Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home and finding they don't fit. For the sake of appearances, he put up with them

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor.

It is easy to say they make being young look like hard work, but wasn't it always hard work, even if the medium of its difficultly was different? At least they are making a project of their lives, a measurable project that can be liked or commented upon.

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)

They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.

He wanted to be in the world and take what came with it, endings local and universal, full stops, periods, looks of injured disappointment and the everyday war. He liked the everyday war. He was taking that with fries. To go.

If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.

Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it's a lived reality, on the ground—and education is at the heart of it." "I

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.

These designs came together very recently, and there's a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost. Though

Even the simplest ideas I'd brought with me did not seem to work

Everything can be taken from you in a second, but the human spirit is so strong. War can teach you so much about evil, and so much about good.

If you are truly telling a South African story then it will be political — because you are dealing with people who lead political lives in an environment which is highly politically charged.

Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living. Or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?

How can two people love each other, create children together, cohabitiate, build a life together, and then end up hating each other in the end.

The world is full of people who remain in relationships that they realize they have no business in. Yet, they stay, hoping and praying for change, believing that the other person will eventually appreciate them and recognize their value.