Quotes About Struggle

It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap.

As terrible as this is, I get it. WE can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are

And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.

Un yo que no quieres. Unos sentimientos que no puedes evitar.

Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn't pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee.

The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted —? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

Because I don't care how often or willingly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because here's the truth: life is catastrophe

Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

Does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end--and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

You are afraid to die?" "Yes, every one is." "But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together. "Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see—each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.

The devil approached the citadel of his heart by stealth, with many zigzags and parallels.

fight like you're the third monkey trying to get on Noah's ark." And brother it's starting to rain

Behind tranquillity lies conquered unhappiness.

Your species. You have a terrific capacity for effing things up. For hurting one another. For making the world a worse place. But then you invent something like ice cream. That makes up for a lot. Makes you worth rooting for.

She thought she'd hit rock bottom when she'd passed out in a disgusting gas station toilet, a needle stuck in her arm, lying in a puddle of someone else's urine for hours until the owner discovered her and called the police. But this—an arm's length from a crazy man who wanted to snack on her—this was the all time low.

I bent over to give my hair another shake, and glanced at my boots, along with the several dozen roaches climbing up them. Then I felt them inside the boots, between the suede and the naked skin of my calves. I

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost." DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy

I was overworked, underpaid, and socially retarded. But

Human beings are incapable of making big decisions when they are being crippled by numerous little decisions. It was why people stayed employed at soul-crushing jobs, because they only had to handle it on a day by day basis, rather than think of it as a forty year wasted chunk of their lives. I

nobody is perfect. Anyone can backslide, even with the best of intentions. That be what the road to hell is paved with, they say.

was orphaned and had to educate

If literature is humanity at its absolute best, striving after the hard truths, straining to shed the egos that cripple nonliterary relationships, then books, the actual objects of books, are the physical expressions of the struggle to craft a better humanity. Entering the culture of books, even the culture of a single book--and every book is the culture of its audience--makes the world feel a little better, a little more true and welcoming.