Quotes About Struggle

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.

Good god what men can do to their brains when their cocks are hard.

Fortune's wheel takes you very high and then throws you very low, and there is nothing you can do but face the turn of it with courage.

We might, either of us, be Queen of England and yet we'll always be nothing to our family.

She looked at me as if for a moment she would seek someone who would understand the dreadful predicament of a woman, in this world ruled by men.

She tried to live like an ordinary woman, but some women cannot live an ordinary life.

You don't need to struggle, your baby is coming. Help him come to us, open your body and let him come into the world. You give birth, you don't force birth or besiege it. It's not a battle, it's an act of love. You give birth to your childd and you can do it gently.

Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.

Dear god, I am only twenty seven, my cause is defeated, my husband is dead. am I to be one of the poor widows who will spend the rest of their days at someone else`s fireside trying to be a good guest? shall I never be kissed again? shall I never feel joy? not ever again?

In a shipwreck, it is every drowning man for himself.

But I warn you that a woman who seeks great power and wealth has to pay a great price, Perhaps you will be a great woman like Melusina, or Yolande, or like me; but you will be like all women; uneasy in the world of men.

Poor little girl. Poor little girl, Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.

I think it is unkind of me to stand there with my hands by my sides and a frown on my face. But I let him go without a blown kiss, without a blessing, without a command to come back safely. I let him go without a word or a gesture of love, for he is going out to fight for my enemy and so he is my enemy now.

How can I bless you when you are cursed in your choice?

Mother, before God, I say, my voice shaking with tears, I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!

I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.

She knew that being a mortal woman is hard on the heart, hard on the feet.

The stewards, and then the bailiffs, and then finally the lawyers meet. They wrangle, they agree, and we are to be married in June. It is no little decision for me - for the first time in my life I have my own lands in my own hands as a widow; once I become a wife everything becomes Lord Stanley's property. I have to struggle to reserve what I can from the law that rules that a wife has no rights, and I keep what I can, but I know that I am choosing my master.

You will have to reconcile yourself, as I do, as Isabel does, to being the defeated.

If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.

When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.

She smiled an empty bitter smile that did not reach her eyes, 'Do you think it can be worse than this? I cannot be charged with treason, I am the Queen of England, I am England. I cannot be divorced, I am the wife of the King. He has run mad this spring and he will recover by autumn. And all I have to do is get through this summer.' 'The Boleyn summer,' I said.

Joan was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.