Quotes About Struggle

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated.

But you never knew what went on inside someone else; how, over time, a thought could become an obsession, and a new shell could form and harden around it.

All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to.

This was the world they were meant to enter: a world of fuckers.

There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.

It was exhausting being a schizophrenic, which he was still convinced he was.

Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?" Goodman shifted in discomfort. "Something like that," he said. "Yes," said the counselor in a suddenly plangent voice. "Always they will be aching. I wish I could tell you something else, but I wouldn't be telling the truth. My wise and gentle friends, this is the way it will be from now on." No one could say anything. "We are so, so fucked," Jules finally said,

Sadness, excitement, then sadness again; it all rose and fell like the sounds of skaters scuffing the floor of the rink. Hold tight! she thought, conveying this to both herself and Cory, thinking of them in bed together, and the joint effort couples had to make to be a couple, and stay a couple. If one let go, then that was it, both of them fell. Hold tight! she thought, imagining his body, and her own much smaller body against it.

Being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, it's unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow.

How are any of us in this room supposed to care about anything, when we're constantly being pulled back by unbearable thoughts and feelings?

But she also saw that the Boyds were people whose love came with added sourness—and maybe, as a result, their son had developed the capacity for unspeakable sadness, and who could blame him? Dennis and Jules had both come from families that hadn't really felt good. This they'd shared, and when they'd come together it was to make a home that did feel good, and even sometimes to say: Fuck you, disappointing families.

Power and love didn't often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go.

Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not.

She saw, briefly, the way the world rarely stopped to salute you or admonish you, regardless of what you had or had not accomplished.

He crashed quietly through the world.

Families always seem to me like this weird accident." "What do you mean?" Opal asked. "I don't know," said Erica. She gestured with both hands, fingers splayed. "It's almost as if a bunch of people who have absolutely no reason to be together all drew straws and somehow wound up on the same commune.

I open the journal now and pick up the pen, but I can't bring myself to write a word.

He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people.

And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it towards you, and as it collects, you really can't believe that there's something else at the end of it. Something that isn't just pain.

Later on, when it wasn't just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there - your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were - both exhausted and frightened Greer.

She'd learned to be composed in public, even as she was once again most likely falling apart.

It was as though there were a box I kept under a bed and pulled out only once in a while, and in this box were crammed Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers and now Lee the journalist. If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers, and that maybe I could have done it if I'd tried.

all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary