Quotes About Struggle

In this, where nurses paced the floor like night watchmen in the bleak hours, lay fragmented women.

Eleanor and Franklin had had six children together, but apparently Eleanor had once described sex with her husband as "an ordeal to be borne".

Things can get pretty rough out there," he says. "Can't they? For you girls? You're all a bunch of warriors, aren't you? Lionhearted.

Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder.    The

Something was consuming the girl. I need help. She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

you will have to fight your entire life. And that's why you'll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.

She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.

It's just nature," I point out, wiping my lab bench, the sweet smell of the ethanol solvent. "Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins." He gins. "Or maybe it's just like musical chairs?" It's a luxury to view it so lightly. But I nod. It's best never to let them see your teeth.

He'd tried to explain it to her, how accidents happen but we really are safe. But there was, already, the sense that nothing he said touched what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can't stop bad things from happening to other people, other things. And that would be hard forever. He'd never quite gotten used to it himself.

Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too.

About Devon, about the lonesomeness of her daughter's life, about—

That's what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It's war paint, it's feathers and claws, it's blood sacrifice.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start – her past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant – and then it does start and you realise it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

Remember this," she says, glowing, her skin golden and life-marked, "you will have to fight your entire life. And that's why you'll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.

Now that I'm caught up in it, I feel a whiff of panic. This is Diane. And just as before, we are thrown together, and just as before, we want the same thing. A prize, dangling.

It's hard, he told her, when everyone wants it so much but you're the one who has to do it.

She had done this thing to me, burdened me with this vile, howling thing. And now it shuddered in me always and I'd felt I might have to live with it forever. I was right.

That's what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters, and sparkle dusts and magicks? It's war paint, it's feathers and claws, it's blood sacrifice.

That's what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It's war paint, it's feather and claws, it's blood sacrifice.

Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.

Is it optimism or madness that keeps one forging ahead despite failure after failure?

My ever-present loneliness only grew worse. How could I complain? I'd come from nothing. I was the luckiest girl in the world. I had a family now. How ungrateful I was, to want anything more.