Quotes About Struggle

It's me who is my enemy Me who beats me up Me who makes the monsters Me who strips my confidence.

The children aren't enough now. One constructs such a fine balance, you know, very fine, matchsticks in fact ...

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet.

Ironic," Ricardo said. "That you must become a monster to keep from going mad.

Living in West Texas is sort of like living in Hell, but without the favorable climate and charming people.

One of the lesser-known contributions of the great Harriet Tubman was the devotion of her life after the war to a similar project. The woman who personally led three hundred slaves to freedom, who was a spy and "general" for the Union, spent her final years trying to establish the John Brown Home for the Aged. When the government refused to give her a full veteran's pension, the former general sold fruit and had a biography published to raise money for the institution.

Added to residential segregation was the powerlessness of blacks to keep vice out of their communities.

The worst description I ever read was by a best-selling novelist who sized up World War II this way: "The war was just terrible.

He could not do most things, and what he could do, he did. But William had always been capable of many things. The stress of choice had weighed on him.

It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.

But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

I knew that I could hate him all I wanted for the way he was hurting me, but I couldn't ever stop loving him, absolutely, for what he was.

This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.

There was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow, let alone forever. To keep you from thinking, there was liquor, an ocean's worth at least, all the usual vices and plenty of rope to hang yourself with. Love is a beautiful liar.

When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.

Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for "beginnings." But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along.

I saw him on the cover of Life magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats - the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size.The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time - but under this, I knew he was still lonely.

What's wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?' 'Hell if I know', he said. 'We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don't we?

He didn't know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next. He was at war now, his loyalty tested at every turn.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

How some victims don't have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don't believe the life they have is theirs to save.

That's what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against yourself.