Quotes About Struggle

She doesn't know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there's nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life of you drip by drip while you slept.

can see the way she's hoping so hard that this might be the time, this might be Help Coming. She's hoping and trying not to hope at the same time. And that's the saddest thing. Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it's definitely a Thing with Claws.

When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you're young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept.

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows." (p.223)

Forse ogni poeta è condannato all'insoddisfazione. Dev'essere per colpa della luce che li abbaglia

My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.

Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out.

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my own life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality.

That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.

they say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. the problem with being human isn't really so temporary.

I feel so completely crazy sometimes. I don't know which way I'm facing. All I can do is just shove all this shit to the side and try to move forward.

It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have some semblance of control. But control was something I'd lost a long time ago.

I feel just, you know, defeated.

The dark is settling in. The sky glows yellow- pale- anemic from the city lights. The Tenderloin at night is a real horror show. Every 3 feet someone is accosting you with a plea for a handout or the offer of drug or sex. The men and women wander the streets and alleys with a threatening, violont want. Takers looking to take, hustlers looking to hustle, all trying to satisfy a craving that is parpatually unsatisfiable. And tonight I'm one of them.

They say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. he problem with being humas isn't really so temporary

The thing is, though, every time I think I'm just gonna give up—that I can't possibly do it, that I'm just going to curl up alone somewhere and waste away, well, I always keep trying. I mean, for some reason I manage to make it through another day and then another day after that.

In a way it's like too serene or whatever - too empty. I feel that familiar feeling of being a dark smudge on this otherwise pristine white canvas. There's just no way to blend in out here.

I guess I just struggle with belonging to any organization. I always feel like I should be able to do it on my own. My ego tells me I'm better than all this... I want to rebel against it, though of course, I don't really have any options.

Somehow that always seemed to happen—we addicts can always find one another. There must be some strange addict radar or something.

And I have this, for now. I just wish I could figure out how to keep my fucking mind from going all over the place - dwelling on all the loss and pain and everything I'VE DONE - then jumping off into the future to how impossible it all seems.

They don't have to struggle like I do - or maybe that's just me comparing my goddamn insides to everyone else's outsides.

It's like the world's gravitational pull has just lessened tenfold. Everything trapped in me, rushing in and out like the ocean against a jetty - pounding over and over, trying to crush the breaker wall with each rhythmic explosion - has finally been taken away. I cry for that and I'm not sure what else.