Quotes About Struggle

I ain't sleepin'. I got too much to puzzle with.

I seen too many you guys. If you had two bits in the worl', why you'd be in gettin' two shots of corn with it and suckin' the bottom of the glass.

You're not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives. And more - you'll see - you're buying bitterness.

It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't foresee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates himself.

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--'We lost *our* land.

First the strangers came with argument and authority and gunpowder to back up both. And in the four hundred years Kino's people had learned only one defense - a slight slitting of the eyes and a slight tightening of the lips and a retirement. Nothing could break down this wall, and they could remain whole within the wall.

I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention,help,and conversation is to be lost.A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost

If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. i'll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain.... If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.

Someone's got to do these things,' he said sullenly. 'Or else fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.

I guess she's just nuts,' he said. 'And if she's nuts, a guy's got to do nuts things. You don't think you could say the hell with her?

The one-eyed man watched them go, and then he went through the iron shed to his shack behind. It was dark inside. He felt his way to the mattress on the floor, and he stretched out and cried in his bed, and the cars whizzing by on the highway only strengthened the walls of his loneliness.

Misfortune is not fair, fate is not just, but they exist just the same.

They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That's for civilians.

Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop.

I climb fences when i got fences to climb.

In town in a whorehouse. That's where your money's goin'. Jesus, I seen it happen too many times. I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.

Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?

It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

You can only fight Fate so far, and when you give in to it you're very strong; because all of your force flows in one direction.

It's hard to split a man down the middle and always to reach for the same half.

chuckling—the sound he made when any force in the world defeated him. He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.

Why do you got to get killed? You ain't so little as mice.

You're growing up. Maybe that's it," he said softly. "Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that's not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white.

Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one.