Quotes About Struggle

Sweat, malice, and hunger pour from me. This is release, or maybe it's just a plea for release.

and everything about me goes from crying out to just plain crying

I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive.... Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with

Sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed – the airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years ).

There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people's vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can't.

They could pretend when they were alone. Lie to themselves about what this was between them. Hell, he could invent a million reasons why he'd stalked over and staked his claim here. But the truth lay behind the sound of her moan and Tyler's answering groan. Kissing Sherry wasn't about her damn rules. It wasn't to save his career. This woman was in his arms because he wanted her there.

A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safe pastures. I cannot fault any such man as takes what ease the world offers him.

Nowhere in the known world, it seemed to her, could she live as she'd been created: at once a creature of body and of mind. It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman's existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture.

I don't think I'm strong enough," Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub's windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, "How do you think people get strong?

Life is muddy. Denying that—thinking there's only one noble path above the fray—can be a poisonous approach to life.

The faded silhouette of Masada offered itself, its mute lines clear testimony for those who knew to read what was written there. A stark choice. Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both.

Then it was only right that she do as her spirit told her, and let the struggle itself answer the question of which was the stronger: her will or her womanly nature.

A woman's body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.

Lying had become her clothing—without it she'd freeze.

Do it, Ester. If you must, then deceive your husband just as you deceived me—but you'll do it with a full belly and a house with children. I wish

and the desire to spare him that grief rose in her like dark well water until she woke, drowning—

remaining fair-minded as their beloved gallery-in-the-making was threatened by two crammed shelves of strange Semitic lettering.

Yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

Ester lay silent under the cover, willing herself toward the sweet sleep she now craved more than almost all else. The death of each day's life. End it, she thought. End this day's life if the world holds mercy.

I was ever ill-suited for this world and could not bend my nature to it.

Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn't what you thought it was.

Her spirit could not be bent, yet her rage found little purchase . . .

No escape to other worlds, nor refuge from the endless river of days.

She pressed her fingertips into the hard wood of the handrail until they whitened. She would constrict the world to a pinhole.