Quotes About Struggle

I so want to give him my notebook--I want to be a real person--he should read my book--I work for him, I cook for him, I'm Doris--Doris isn't just some piece of dirt. I don't want to be innocent, I want to be the real Doris here and not that silly civilized product of the Green Moss's imagination.

Gilgi is drifting in the river of superfluous feelings. Superfluous? They were once, they seemed to be once. Isn't she happy? Of course she is. Often. But the hours of happiness come at a high price. The bill is presented promptly. Pay it! With what? With fear and twinges of pain. No, I don't think the price is too high, I just find the currency strange. Fear - pain! To whom should I pay them? Who profits from this odd currency?

I don't want to work, but I have buoys of cork in my stomach. They won't let me go down, will they?

Times are horrible. Nobody has any money and there is an immoral spirit in the air — just as you're getting ready to hit on someone for some cash, they're already hitting on you!

I bet you never had to live through really tough times." "Yes, I did," he says. Well, I'm not going to ask what he considers tough times. There are those who already feel sorry for themselves when they haven't had a hot meal by three in the afternoon.

There are not many such as I on the road today, pleading passage, claiming the alms of roadside charity.

I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.

This is what being alive's all about, all those fucked up feelings. You've got to have them; when you stop, watch out.

Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.

Society now hovers over mankind like a crushing weight, sometimes it seems with a willful malevolence.

You cannot be the good all the time — sometimes it is necessary to get angry. [Vincent Van Gogh]

He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

schizophrenic land of liberty

Our own domestic Negro situation is another thing.

His bright hope had become a black cloud of despair.

It was now May of 1520; Cortés had been in Tenochtitlán since November, and he had only succeeded in trapping himself.

Realizing that the enemy was determined to fight to the bitter end, Cortés remarked, ". . . We would recover little if any of the treasure that had been taken from us, and they would force us to destroy them totally. This last caused me the greater sorrow," he said, "because it weighed on my soul.

An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.

The modern world, he thought resentfully, prepares you very poorly for the tests it puts you to.

Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn't deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game.

Now,' Elias said, 'if only I didn't have to go home to my lousy wife. I married her in 1929. A lot of things've changed since 1929.' He sighed. 'What's a woman?' he asked. 'A Woman is a trap.

The wrecked mess of flesh had to hurt like hell and I was just starting to feel a little sympathy for Kujima when some distant corner of my brain sent me a reminder that he'd shot me, beaten me and was about to light me on fire.