Quotes About Struggle

It wasn't always easy getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning to go to the rink. Sometimes I wanted to just go back to sleep.

This world is made of darkness and light, my girl, and in the darkest times you have to believe the sun will come again, even if you yourself don't live to see it.

On good days I felt like a chrysalis from which a butterfly had emerged, and on bad days I felt like a chewing-gum wrapper someone had thrown in the hedges.

I'm only as brave as I have to be . . . and I do not want to have to be this brave.

My bald pate bobs and blunders, I bang it when I fall; My cock's gone soft and clammy And I can't hear when they call.

You are naught but skin and bone and suffering.

He fought for his very survival. If he fought dirty sometimes that does not diminish the fact that he refused to give up.

we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Ephesians 6:12)

That our path was hard does not mean it was not also right, nor that it is not paved with blessings.

And as for writing my poetry, he claimed the toil of it was too much strain. Toil? Writing is my life. It is not toil. And he cannot stop me.

But his letters . . . I took them with me, let the "ounces" cry aloud. I tried to leave, and could not. They would not be left; it was not my fault. I will not be scolded.

I will admit that "just Jane" seems to gain insight from hard times. I wish to ask the Almighty about this, for why do we learn more from struggles than victories?

And though I continually fight impatience, in all but this vice... I am truly content.

Nearly all that we call human history … [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

No matter how hard people work to suppress their knowledge of God, creation itself keeps challenging them. "Human life is a continual wrestling match with God and his created order," writes Thomas Johnson. 14

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.

In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British.

Montserrat Fontes's disturbing novel of a family trying to survive the brutal Porfirio Díaz regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Dreams of the Centaur, is followed by First Confession.

Amy Wilentz's Martyrs' Crossing is set against the ongoing tension of Israeli-Palestinian relations. When a Palestinian woman is turned back at the checkpoint at Ramallah as she attempts to take her sick child to an Israeli hospital, she and the young Israeli soldier who's guarding the crossing find their lives altered forever.

Young people are trying to live out a worldview that does not match their true nature, and it is tearing them apart with its pain and heartache.

The great drama of history is the tug of war between God and humanity. On one hand, God reaches out to humanity to make himself known. On the other hand, humans desperately seek to avoid knowing him. In the words of theologian Thomas K. Johnson, we "can take the account of Adam and Eve hiding from God behind a bush or tree as a metaphor for the history of the human race." 18

I never learned how to process my own pain.

Trying to forgive all these years, I had suppressed my anger and memories because I couldn't forgive if I acknowledged my experiences