Quotes About Struggle

My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

U.S. Black women intellectuals are not a female segment of William E. B. DuBois's notion of the "talented tenth." One is neither born an intellectual nor does one become one by earning a degree. Rather, doing intellectual work of the sort envisioned within Black feminism requires a process of self-conscious struggle on behalf of Black women, regardless of the actual social location where that work occurs.

Nancy White, a Black inner-city resident, explores the connection between experience and beliefs: Now, I understand all these things from living. But you can't lay up on these flowery beds of ease and think that you are running your life, too.

In a widely cited piece titled "The Middle-Class Black's burden," Ms. McClain laments, "I am not comfortably middle class; I am uncomfortably middle class. I have made it, but where?

Despite differences of age, sexual orientation, social class, region, and religion, U.S. Black women encounter societal practices that restrict us to inferior housing, neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and public treatment and hide this differential consideration behind an array of common beliefs about Black women's intelligence, work habits, and sexuality. These common challenges in turn result in recurring patterns of experiences for individual group members.

An oppressed group's experiences may put its members in a position to see things differently, but their lack of control over the ideological apparatuses of society makes expressing a self-defined standpoint more difficult.

Stewardesses are still paid so little that in many cases, new hires qualify for food stamps.

I just let it be hard while it is hard without going crazy fo it to get easy.

Sadness is Steam rising Tears falling A breath you take in But can't let out As hard as you try.

I ask Ama why. "Why," I say, "must women suffer so?" "This has always been our fate," she says. "Simply to endure," she says, "is to triumph.

All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don't die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don't have to fight. I don't have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.

she is bent under the weight of her burden

But sometimes, I hate myself for hating him. Simply because he is an ordinary boy.

This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombs—the ones who would be born only to be buried next season.

This has always been our fate," she says. "Simply to endure," she says, "is to triumph.

I don't know what this is, this Revolution. But I think maybe this guy not too smart. The rich, they chase you if you steal their things. Poor people, they the one who share.   Three

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

Sometimes when we're in situations where we feel we're not in control, we do things, especially things that take a lot of energy, as a way of making ourselves feel we have some power.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

No, señor. The deeper you push the iron into them, the harder they fight you.