Quotes About Struggle

I'd like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn't. And yet. And yet, this life we'd built filled our car

But always in the back of your throat is this scream, barely suppressed.

You've always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most. Danny shrugged. Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess. Always the danger, that. Then one day, sure, you can't remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on. Or why you work so hard at the holding.

People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn't reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.

Another long pull of the sawteeth across the pink folds of his brain, and Teddy had to bite down against a scream and he heard Rachel's screams in there too with the fire and he saw her looking into his eyes and felt her breath on his lips and felt her face in his hands as his thumbs caressed her temples and that fucking saw went back and forth through his head— don'ttakethosefuckingpills

Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their Amens and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he'd get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing.

What they didn't tell you about absolute power was that it was never absolute; the instant you had it, someone had already lined up to try to take it away. Princes could sleep soundly, but never kings. The ear was always tuned for the creak on the

You told yourself it was okay—because that's what you had to do to cross a body of water—but it wasn't.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein

We're humans, so we're messy

The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It's all we can do.

Dennis Lehane

Teddy wished that his mother were still alive so she could teach her grandkids you had to get hard, strong. The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took.

She couldn't adapt to the present, to who they were now, warts and all, so she drove winding lanes into the past to warm herself.

El tema, escribió él, es el dolor. Cuánto acumulo, cuánto esquivo.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

and it blew open a chamber of her heart that refuses to close no matter how hard she presses down on it.

Es la tensión —le expliqué—. La espera. —¿Qué quieres decir? —A veces parece peor que la simple confrontación. Te parece que si pudieras hacer algo dejarías de sentirte como si trataras de desprenderte de tu propia piel. Asintió.

Not that Danny seemed intent on fucking it up, just that he was a man after all, and no one knew better than Luther himself how completely a man could step on his own dick when what he thought he wanted contradicted what he knew he needed. The

Vincent looks ready to pop out of his skin. Like a lot of guys who try too hard to act like they deserve respect, he has very low tolerance for people he correctly perceives don't respect him. This

She remembered a feeling she could barely articulate, that her mother, never happy, grew even more bitter with success. Years later, she'd suspect the reason was because the fame and the money robbed her mother of excuses for her unhappiness. Her mother, brilliant at analyzing the problems of strangers, never had a clue how to diagnose herself. So she spent her life in search of solutions to problems that were born, raised, lived, and died within the boundaries of her own marrow.

searched for reasons not to blow my brains out. I came up with two or three dozen real fast, but I still wasn't certain I could listen to many more conversations between Brandon and one of his "bras.

We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.' He solemnly made the sign of the cross. 'But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?' 'Not on my land,' Joe said. 'But it is not your land. It's God's. You are renting it. This rum? This life?' He patted his chest. 'We are all just renting from God.