Quotes About Struggle

UNDERSTANDING the destruction of slavery in the United States not as a single climactic event but as a long process that stretched across a near-century provides a useful and perhaps fuller appreciation of the reality of emancipation. Freedom's arrival was not the work of a moment but the product of movement; it was a process, rather than an occasion.12 Taking the long view of slavery's demise

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will...

You will be fierce. You will fearless. And you will make work you know in your heart is not as good as you want it to be.

Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

uncorny, human sized drama

It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just gotta fight your way through.

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.

Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of the males creates a new conflict: it is with a bad grace that the man lets her go.

She might never understand why the Almighty had allowed so much tragedy to befall her during the past two years, but she wasn't going to turn away from him as many people did when life got tough. She was going to cling tight to his promise that he would be with her always. And she was going to trust that one day soon, life would be bright again. Because if she didn't, the shadows hovering over her soul could swoop in and shroud her in darkness forever.

I don't know if anyone ever "wins" a war, Jeth.

Women in London must have learned not to breathe

A writer […] is poor in any country; he is only rich in spirit and in the satisfaction of having concluded an intellectual feat.

Knives poised close to the throat—then the voices are slowly imbibed. Glutted majesty heaves himself back from the vampiric supper, While the Judas trees thrive in the hush of their forested bed.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

It was funny yet pitiable when I imagined how they gathered whatever white cloth they could find, attached it to a dead twig, and marched forward just to surrender

about death and violence. Noah would deny it.

isn't just a minor inconvenience.

And how close is a nervous breakdown to going over the edge? You never realize what a tightrope we all walk until you almost slip into the chasm.

All those years, all the frustration, just sapped the life out of him. No one is going to do that to me.

life moved in cycles of darkness and light, and even when things were darkest there was usually something bright to hold on to.

It's hard to know what's right when everyone thinks you're wrong.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.