Quotes About Struggle

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade

Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.

boat had swept away most of their catch. Once

I want to do what's right. But how can I, when I am faced with only impossible choices?

I have cuts and bruises that do not map a course.

There was a girl, once upon a time and in your time. She embraced her life up to a point, then rejected it, and from that rejection have come all her difficulties.

She came to feel that too much had been required of her. She would have her revenge. She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

When he's not lynching you, he's humiliating you, said the men at the dinner table. They

If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon… White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

too, rolled and

Civil rights. The New Left. Black Power. Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing.

The human psyche is pathetic," I say—I declaim—to my psychopharmacologist. "It's what we have, Miss Jefferson," he replies, "it's what we have.

There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what? So what? Go on.

Life is so long, and too hard, and then it ends so cruel and sudden!

You must watch and wait, Branza, to see what powers you have and don't have. It is not like home. We ruled there. Everything fell into place around what we wanted. Here, we are not the only ones wanting, and we must make room for other people's desires.

And here she was, back where terrors could immobilize her, and wonders too, where life might become gulps of strong ale rather than sips of bloom-tea. She did not know whether she was capable of lifting the cup, let alone drinking the contents.

There is nothing more perplexing in life than to know at what point you should surrender your intellect to your faith.

Since the accident, Jonathan had noticed, she held on to things, a doorframe, a chair, as it either she or the world needed steadying.

Do you know," he said, "that there are people who can't go near high places not because they're afraid of heights but because they feel such a lure to jump?

But in 1856, Fort Yuma was hellish for reasons beyond the heat. It was bedeviled by blinding dust storms and prone to Indian attacks. The barracks were plagued with ants, gnats, and, when the river was high, mosquitoes, and the toilets were open trenches heaped with dirt and lime to squelch the stench.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.