Quotes About Struggle

We're earlobe deep in doo-doo

He collapsed, all his efforts spent.

Toil and blood, effort and hardship, these were payments worth making in return for a greater future. Ideals were never won cheaply, whether the cost was the raising of one dream city or the razing of another.

What a profoundly bleak and inhospitable cosmos you inhabit, colonel-commissar. No wonder you fight so much.

This was the move that was supposed to sweep me away. She seemed a little out of practice. I guess life with Charley Royce hadn't exactly been the third reel of The English Patient. It had to be bad if Mickey Dolan was your back-up. Not to put Mickey down but he didn't strike me as the lover-boy type. Especially when he took out his teeth. The last time Mickey thought about pleasing anybody but himself was just before he discovered how to sniff glue.

Veeva should count her blessings. Three years ago it was cocaine and a year ago it was crack and lemme tell you, that stuff you got to have. You do anything for that high." He laughed again, savoring his memories. "Where do you think the furniture went? Up my nose, that's where. She finally had me carted out of here screaming like an insane man. Spent some time in Bellevue with little sparkly bugs coming out my orifices. Compared to that being a drunk is practically a sensible existence.

I knew what Charley would do. He would spend the evening drinking himself into the mindset of a cinder block. If they had given him as much as a hundred bucks, it would be a long night.

Because of the way God has made us, it is impossible finally and completely to deaden the soul. The soul will resurrect, in spite of the cruelty used to destroy it. It will pop up and then be slain again, return and be shoved down through contempt. The power to destroy the soul is not in the hands of Satan, another human being, or even oneself. Nevertheless, when we manage to deaden our soul, even temporarily, we open the door to terrible consequences.

In every story, in every life, there are moments of death that take away our name and rename us as strangers, orphans or widows. At the moment of being unnamed, we are thrown into our story. We lose the name Friend and are given the name Reject.

But this home over here: it needed paint but had flowers neatly planted all the way around it. That one over there had a tire swing out front, tied to a fat magnolia tree. Behind another, a lush vegetable garden. You got to fight not to give into despair, he told himself. You got to see the good that's mixed in with the bad.

In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day.

Anybody could rise above anything in America. ... No, they can't, Marie said, from the backseat. How was I supposed to break out of there? What were my people going to say? Uppity. That's what. 'Cause if I can, why can't they? But I tell you what, I don't even know how it's done. I never seen nobody do it.

How many bodies were floating around, and how many more would die? Not the uptown swells with cars, second homes, and wallets full of credit cards, but those who had no car, no friend with a car, those who'd never left New Orleans and weren't about to flee just because the mayor said to go.

Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet.

All it took was a couple weeks and boom--they sucked the crazy out of you and your soul went with it.

Maybe I was a bad kid. But I was also slowly turning to stone.

Without any legal limit on working hours or minimum wages, the working day lasted for sixteen hours and the pay sufficed for only the most meagre existence. Trade unions began to form, but they could do little as long as labour was unskilled and each worker immediately replaceable by another.

I think my strength comes from being an insane drunk. Near death. Wanting death like a lover every day for years. My talent comes from madness - having survived madness.

I was a degenerate, with an insatiable capacity for perversion. Incapable of change. I could do anything except not drink.

The passion has never left me. I live as two people - myself, Dan Fante, and Bruno Dante or Mickey Di Salvo, or whoever I say I am in one of my books. I can tap that Bruno character any time I need to. He lives inside me like a quiet, simmering pool of magma. Years ago I stopped feeding him with booze and he was kind enough to stop trying to kill me. That's our truce.

Dear God: Please help me to know what the fuck to do with my life and how to fix it.

Because I have to treat the mental part of my disease. Quitting booze is one thing. Living with my brain sober is another.

In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. In going

George Washington was rich in land but not in money. When he became president of the United States, he had to borrow money from a friend to make the trip to New York City for