Quotes About Struggle

My mother was so angered by love's failures, Mary, that she navigated with spite as her compass.

She said that standing between my mother and this man was like standing in the current of a river. She said it was a soft, endless . . . push, which slips you off your feet if you're not anchored to something.

He took it between his fingers, bore down with his bruised knuckle on its ridges, and like a miner picking his way toward an unknown destination began to write—slowly, steadily, filling the void with work. Was that what sadness did to a man?

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.

Niet kunnen lezen of schrijven. Nooit kunnen ontsnappen naar een andere wereld, noch een schuilplaats hebben voor de eindeloze stroom dagen.

a household was a creature of bottomless hungers. It ravened for wood and coal and white starch, for sailcloth and bread and ale; for breath and sinew, and life itself, which wreathed away invisibly beneath the press of daily labor like the wax of a lit candle.

Why must man struggle to live, when he inevitably dies?

They would work together in pursuit of whatever it was their lot to discover. He didn't like her. But neither did he pity her. At least there was that.

Yet the body insists on the struggle for life. Why?

A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safer pasture

Hope against reason: an opiate she'd long abandoned.

At times she could barely speak in response to the rabbi's questions. Other times she could hardly find enough breath for all the words she needed to utter, though the rabbi listened with great patience. On those days the new thoughts so brimmed in her that she felt the white plaster ceiling and the timbers and the brickwork walls couldn't contain her—should she raise her head to speak once more, she'd shake the house down.

he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

I lost myself, but in the end that helped me find myself. You've just got to have faith and work at it." "With anything?" I ask. "Anything," she says, as a gap finally opens in the intersection. "As long as you accept the hardest thing of all: that you might have to lose to win.

All monsters have their fits of depression.

What a terrible thing could be freedom. Trees were free when they were uprooted by the wind; ships were free when they were torn from their moorings; men were free when they were cast out of their homes—free to starve, free to perish of cold and hunger.

Life's not all beer and skittles

Hace falta estar ciego, tener como metidas en los ojos raspaduras de vidrio, cal viva, arena hirviendo, para no ver la luz que salta en nuestros actos, que ilumina por dentro nuestra lengua, nuestra diaria palabra. Hace falta querer morir sin estela de gloria y alegría, sin participación de los himnos futuros, sin recuerdo en los hombres que juzguen el pasado, sombrío de la Tierra. Hace falta querer ya en vida ser pasado, obstáculo sangriento, cosa muerta, seco olvido.

There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.

Only he who is without anything is without enemies.

If the windmill should prove too formidable, said he, from the threshold, I may see what can be done with the wind.

Poverty smothers our dreams even before we have finished dreaming them.

Tout grandit, m'a-t-il dit un jour, sauf les catastrophes. Elles sont énormes quand elles naissent; ensuite, elles rapetissent un peu plus chaque jour.

Ne zaman ba?lad???, ne zaman bitece?i belli olmayan zavall? bir sirk; bu biziz i?te.