Quotes About Struggle

During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.

I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit. Gentlemen,

Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie.

These displaced persons are mostly unwanted where they fled from; unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go.

For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile.

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians. Nothing

Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No,

She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.

We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The

I had been resigned to the consolation of man's best friend, i.e., self-pleasure, and certainly did not possess the wherewithal to consort with prostitutes.

You tried to play their 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.

He winced. I had hit him where it hurt, in the solar plexus of his conscience, where everyone who was an idealist was vulnerable. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The question was one of commitment.

happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game,

By now the only part of me not seating were my eyeballs... An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel...

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope,

The immigrant is the one who wants to come, unlike the refugee, who is forced to come.

I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.

What was it like to live in a time when one's fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one's country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?

Revolutions begin this way, with men willing to fight no matter what the odds, volunteering to give up everything because they had nothing.

No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do no, it was truly impossible, for how I choose me againse myself?