Quotes About Struggle

Hurrying, dragging, falling, crying, calling out names hopefully and hopelessly.

We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own. If the patient dies from the treatment, it was not because the medicine was not good.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death

A little war of defense for helpless things was going on inside her. People ought to have some regard for helpless things. She wanted to fight about it.

De object wuz tuh git dere. So Ah got up on de high stool lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere.

She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. Most humans didn't love one another nohow, and this mislove was so strong that even common blood couldn't overcome it all the time.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah

I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.

But we see something else: the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo's wisdom becomes so apparent, toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does. Offering peace.

You won't git far and you won't be long, when dat big gut reach over and grab dat little one

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill.

my people had sold me and the white people had bought me.

The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects

the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving.

The icy sword of the square-toed one had cut off his breath and left his hands in a pose of agonizing protest.

They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.

Ah betcha you wants some dressed up dude dat got to look at de sole of his shoe everytime he cross de street tuh see whether he got enough leather dere tuh make it across.

If God don't think no mo' 'bout 'em then Ah do, they's a lost ball in de high grass.

the fiend from hell specially sent to lovers arrived at Janie's ear. Doubt.

That was the rock she was battered against.