Quotes About Struggle

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Donna grew up with her parents arguing almost continually, and had consequently believed marriage was something that was not only inevitable, but also inevitably miserable.

An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us

Nora wanted to live in a world where cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.

the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when

Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea

Equidistante. Não alinhada a uma margem nem à outra. Era assim que ela havia se sentido na maior parte da vida. Presa bem no meio. Lutando, se debatendo, simplesmente tentando sobreviver sem saber para onde ir. Nem com que caminho se comprometer sem arrependimentos.

She couldn't even manage 'cat owner'. Or 'one-hour-a week piano tutor'. Or 'human capable of conversation'.

You lose your job, then more shit happens. The wind whispered through the trees. It began to rain.

So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate.

I stacked the days up like Jenga blocks, imagining I was making progress, and then—crash—along would come a five-hour panic attack or a day of total apocalyptic darkness, and those Jenga days would topple back down again.

Mum turned around in the passenger seat and looked at me and smiled and the smile had a slightly crumpled quality, her eyes glazed with tears. I felt it. The weight of Mum. The weight of being a son that had gone wrong. The weight of being loved. The weight of being a disappointment. The weight of being a hope that hadn't happened the way it should have.

If the modern world is making us feel bad, then it doesn't matter what else we have going for us, because feeling bad sucks. And feeling bad when we are told there is no reason to, well, that sucks even more.

LIFE IS HARD. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that.

those ever-darkening stairs of the mind

When you have a bout of mental illness for the first time, you imagine this is how your life is going to be for ever. You will have depression punctuated by panic attacks and that is how things will stay. And that was terrifying. The claustrophobia of it. There seemed no way out.

You get near a black hole and the gravitational pull drags you into its bleak, dark reality.

mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness

So she stopped trying to think about what to write and, in sheer exasperation, just put down the first thing that came to her, the thing that she felt inside her like a defiant silent roar that could overpower any external destruction. The one truth she had, a truth

No. Es por todo. Parece imposible vivir sin hacer daño la gente.

Because life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn't matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree. I wanted to be many things in my life. All kinds of things. But if your life is rotten, it will be rotten no matter what you do. The damp rots the whole useless thing . . .

That's what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed. Sloping roofs (and other ways to deal with the rain) and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, – William Shakespeare, Hamlet   I couldn't sleep.

At the bottom of the pit, I always had to force myself to find the beauty, the goodness, the love, however hard it was. It was hard to do. But I had to try. Change doesn't just happen by focusing on the place you want to escape. It happens by focusing on where you want to reach. Boost the good guys, don't just knock the bad guys. Find the hope that is already here and help it grow.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape.