Quotes About Struggle

and the poor slob soon became a lame duck.

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I'm going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.

Believe me, Lang, the first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive … for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.

He looked up at the heavy smoke palls over the city and repeated softly to himself, "It's all for nothing. All for nothing."*

One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas. The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying. ("New York Blues")

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.

The story thread suddenly dropped in a hopeless snarl, just as he was about to get it through the needle's eye of the first line.

But there are three things in this world you can't shrug off: death, taxes – and a girl who loves you.

She is in full delirium. But delirium is the antithesis of death; it is the body's struggle to survive. ("Jane Brown's Body")

When you have an uneasy feeling that happiness is beginning to slip through your fingers you hang on as tightly as you can; you don't give it an added push away from you.

I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't.

It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

I hate the world. Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty. (from COVER CHARGE - currently not listed)

I was trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.

You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you've never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. ("Dusk To Dawn")

La guerrilla es de todos los tiempos y todas las latitudes y el ocupante no dejará de ser nunca el enemigo para toda alma bien nacida, lo mismo que ocupación significa siempre violencia.

Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work.

We must be so careful that we do not refuse the cross that the Lord has given us to carry. Let us remember that our present sufferings serve to prepare us for entering into the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It says," I began slowly, "that a Light has come into this world, so that we need no longer walk in the dark. Is there darkness in your life, Lieutenant?

This was evil's hour: we could not run away from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work.