Quotes About Struggle

I´d never heard a man cry before, Bob, but...it´s awful. (...) I think some man aren´t used to it and don´t know what to do with all that feeling. Their emotions are hexane ignited in their chests and rips them apart, and then they feel like they´re going to die-just as something was dying, at that moment in Mitch.

You really didn't appreciate how thick, how powerful water was until you had to fight it.

Thinking about all that was exhausting. Despite the hours I'd spent getting shrink-wrapped, I still wasn't sold that talking did a whole heck of a lot except let everyone else know what was going on inside your head. It's not like talking ever made anything go away.

She'd drawn the moment of her death. No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death.

Would it interest you, at all, to know that he did try to scramble back onto the ice? That his hands grabbed and his fingers clawed, but the ice—that treacherous, greedy, teasing ice—kept breaking and breaking and breaking, sketching a path straight for me? And that when he saw what would happen to me, he stopped trying to save himself? Would you believe that someone could love anyone that much?

A chronic headache muttered in her temples, but like Barrett said, no one ever died from pain. True, but some days you didn't much enjoy living either.

You only want to brawl. You want a fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes," said Jess.

How could you get past a splinter that had worked into your eye and scratched deeper every time you blinked?

You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes.

In peaceful times in a peaceful country a man grows up, goes to school, marries, works, suffers illnesses, grows old. He may go through the whole of life without understanding what freedom is. No doubt he always feels free to the extent to which it is proper for a respectable citizen with average powers of imagination to be free.

I knew that people lived badly, remembered the barracks of the Khamovniki brewery, had seen flophouses, all-night cafés, drunkards, cruel and ignorant people, prison. But all that had been from the outside, and in the courtroom I caught a glimpse of people's hearts.

I am your boy drowning in this country, who doesn't know the word for drowning and yells I am diving for the last time!

How could anyone mistake Mom for white? Mom was a proud black woman, the proudest I knew. She hated us having to take welfare food, hated accepting anything we needed but did not earn. We had a picture of Marcus Garvey on the living-room wall, talking about going back to Africa, talking about the power of blackness and the strength of the Negro heart. I couldn't imagine looking at Mom and not seeing that.

Mom talked a good game about the power of blackness, but she knew that the white world held even more power. You just needed to find a way to break in.

Maybe it had been me causing this trouble all along. All my antics. I was the problem, the one who couldn't do right, no matter what.

The government men dragged Mom out of the house. They held her by the elbows and ankles and shoulders and thighs, their harsh, meaty hands digging into her softness. She flailed against their touch, but they overpowered her with ease, the way white men always know how to do.

I couldn't ever be more than that in Lansing. Can't ever be more anyplace, it turns out, as long as I wear this brown skin. I used to think things were different, because Papa used to tell me stories about all the great things I could be and could do. But now I understand. Now I know they were just stories. Just ideas in his head.

There are no historic firsts, no grand gestures, no monuments or museums that undo generations of exclusions under law, policy, and practice, or that stop the expulsion. It makes me want to holler. Tell the truth. What is this symbolic republic?

And yes, slavery was abolished, Jim Crow is over, but the prisons, the persistence of poverty, are constant reminders of how the past made the present.

The problem of the world today is the people talk on and on about democracy, freedom, justice. But I don't give a damn about democracy if I am worried about survival.

My dreams have become puny with the reality my life has become.

Era inútil, mis oraciones se sentían vacías. Había comenzado una guerra en mi alma, y ya no podía seguir orándole a un Dios de amor con el corazón lleno de odio.

Then Jesus spoke: "Mountains are moved with faith, Immaculee, but if faith were easy, all the Mountains would be gone".

I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me.