Quotes About Struggle

I didn't feel that I had any good qualities. Or rather, none were good enough. Nothing I did or said was good enough, but I couldn't make anyone understand the way I felt.

I had no idea that the simple act of running a sharp blade across my wrist would change everything so completely. I wasn't after happiness anymore. I just wanted to survive.

What I wanted was a simple response. I didn't want to feel, that was too difficult. I wanted to hurt, I wanted real, tangible, physical pain. That I could understand.

For the first time in months, I felt together. Sharp. In hurting myself, I had at last found a way to release the pressure. But it was more than that. I was now different. I felt different. I'd discovered a way to control my feelings. Just because self-mutilation wasn't deemed an acceptable coping mechanism didn't mean I was going to stop doing it

Relief was what I was looking for that day, and I didn't care how I got it. What I wanted - what I needed - was a pain that I could see and deal with. I couldn't cope with the mess inside of me any longer, and cutting myself seemed to be the best solution. I knew that it would work. What I didn't know was that I was about t engage in a behavior that was not just dangerous but highly, highly addictive.

Some days, it was enough just to know that I had a packet of blades in the house. They were a cold, very sharp, security blanket.

An increasingly large part of me believed that this was it, this was my life and it wasn't going to get better. The problem was me.

Noam held a storm in his hands, and he couldn't feel a thing.

It was a difficult situation." Dara laughed bitterly. "Well. What made it worse, of course, was that I was madly in love with Álvaro from the moment I met him.

But I think I understand now what Shackleton said yesterday, how hero is not always doing something grand. It's when things get so bad, and you keep on anyway.

I arrived in California with no job, no car, and no money, but, like millions of other girls, a dream.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit.

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do...is to actually do the right thing.

The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don't understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars—many of which this country has had a hand in. Although

we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you're floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.

So, remember what we learned in the lycée, the words of Phan Boi Chau? 'For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country.

Always resent, never relent.