Quotes About Struggle

They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn't solve anything and didn't save anyone even a little bit? What then?

I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said. "It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.

Whatever they were, they were living their lives, out there doing it, making their mistakes. Somehow I'd gotten stuck along the way […] and I didn't know how to free myself exactly.

It was terrible to feel so empty, as if I were nothing. Why couldn't I be happy? And just what was happines anyway?

There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts.

I was falling in love, and it was wonderful, and it was awful.

If you guys can't make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

a lot of the time we don't tell anyone because we can't.

I wish I could break into pieces," I told him one night, just a week after I'd come back. "That would feel better somehow. Isn't the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you're alive, but really you're blown apart?

A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.

He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn't help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow?

It was the end of Ernest's struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this unhappy.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

If the raging waters had reached out to swallow me, I would have let them. I wanted to die that day—I did—and there'd been other times, too. Not many, but they were there, and as I watched Ernest twitch in an uneasy sleep, I couldn't help wondering if we all had them. And if so, if we survived them, was it by chance alone? Hours

my doubt is loud,

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

And if I tried to talk to him or, God forbid, ask him to take it easy on the whisky, he'd lash out. "Oh, sod off, Beryl. It's all easy for you, isn't it?

don't know how she made her money. I didn't help her out, I can tell you that. I knew she'd drink whatever I gave her, or whatever else she was snorting or shooting. I stopped asking.

Because it's not always easy to know how to live.

I'm almost dizzy listening to him. A big part of me would give anything to finally put away Jenny's murderer, for all the same reasons Will has, plus my own. But he means the others, too, a massive undertaking by anyone's standards.

With this much loss, you begin to think it's in the blood, as if there's a dark magnet pulling the body in that direction—pulling, maybe, from the beginning.

A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered.

He's like a human bomb with dozens of trip wires. Some of them I can see, but most are deeply inside him.

In the center if the road, I saw a heavy black sewing machine on its side, as if it had crawled out onto the street to die.