Quotes About Struggle

I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.

The Lord gives us wings He gives us a stomach we can fly or vomit

Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life.

But all the heart break of her heroins had not prepared her for her own.

Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.

Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It was what I had always wanted for him, but I felt a slight pang of possessiveness sharing it with others. Overriding that feeling was the joy of seeing Robert's face, suffused with confirmation, as he glimpsed the future he had so resolutely sought and had worked so hard to achieve.

He tried everything from science to voodoo, everything buy prayer. That, at least, I could give him in abundance. I prayed ceaselessly for him, a desperate human prayer. Not for his life, no one could take that cup from him, but for the strength to endure the unendurable.

But we keep on going, he continued, fostering all kinds of crazy hopes. To redeem the lost, some sliver of personal revelation. It's an addiction, like playing the slots, or a game of golf.

It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a skater pin. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection.

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

that he was a good boy trying to be bad.

Eu não conseguia me identificar com movimentos políticos. Quando tentava participar de algum, sentia-me tomada por outra forma de burocracia. Perguntava-me se alguma coisa que fazia tinha importância.

All writers are bums...

I thought of Thomas Paine's words: these are the times that try men's souls. Outside, the rain ceased but high winds remained. And what was truth remained the truth. It was the last day of the year of the monkey and the golden cockerel was crowing, for the insufferable yellow-haired confidence man had been sworn in, with a Bible no less, and Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed seemed somewhere else entirely.

Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling — confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph — and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer's debris.

For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. I too desired to feel more of the world. Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels. We had ventured out like Maeterlinck's children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.

the signs that mock me as I go.

My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die.

and men falling like chess pieces carved from the weight of centuries of indiscretions and the slaughter of worshippers and the guns and the guns and the guns and the guns.

The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

What is the heart but a small hand of agonies?

He had told me I had nothing to worry about, but in the end I did. Yet I understood why he couldn't tell me. I think having to define his impulses and confine his identity in terms of sexuality was foreign to him. His drives toward men were consuming but I never felt loved any less. It wasn't easy for him to sever our physical ties, I knew that.

Cuándo deja algo de ser hermoso, un aspecto fiel del corazón, para convertirse en algo desviado, ligeramente apartado del eje, y después precipitarse en un vacío obsesivo?