Quotes About Struggle

There are people with their hands in their hair, holding in their brains.

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

Non chiamai Marion. Provai un senso di solitudine, in mancanza di parole migliori, ma in effetti è la parola giusta, una cosa a cui ho sempre cercato di oppormi e da cui sapevo come uscire, ma talvolta anche questo non bastava, e non la chiamai perché non volevo arrendermi, guardando la notte che scendeva.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.

Choice is a subtle form of disease.

She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life.

That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.

But she missed simple things, parents' birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn't have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.

Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seemed to weave through the lives of self-reliant women.

We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.

Fee-uck, man. This game is still on. I get that sixty-two yet. I get his ass and whip it into shape. Damnright. I get that shitpiss sixty-two and beat his black ass into the ground. He's white, I said. I know he's white. They're all white. Everybody's white. Black fucks.

Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore? I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt. What guilt? The guilt of being innocent victims.

It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

This is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.

Once you live in the street, there's nothing but the street.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.

But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I've been fighting all my life.