Quotes About Struggle

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

He shook his head. "I see you trying to be tough skinned, but that makes sense. As a woman you'll have to work twice as hard for everything. I'm not sure I could do it." He lit a cigarette and drew on it, the end flaring red in the dark. When he released the held smoke, he looked at me. "I think you're rather brave, actually." Was

I needed peace just as much as he did, and to believe in the value of my work again. I wanted to run far away until the dark voices in my head quieted. But his needs upstaged mine.

That's the saddest piece as I see it, and have over and over. 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. (seven) All the way to the village, I feel like a shaken-up snow globe, sharp flecks of memory colliding head on.

In exchange for Pegasus's stall and my own bunk, D gave me two horses to train. They were both past their prime, dull eyed and recalcitrant, but I was trying to prove myself. I would have to treat them like royalty. I laboured over their exercise and feeding schedules, filling notebooks, trying to meet them on their own territory, and to find or understand something untapped in them, something no one had yet seen. Dynasty,

real business of what it meant to live in those time periods came alive for

Races weren't supposed to be pageants or cocktail parties. They were tests. Hundreds of hours of training came down to a few breathless moments—and only then would anyone know if the animals were ready, which would rise and which would stumble, how the work and the talent would match up to carry this horse through, while that one would be left wearing dust, the jockey ashamed or surprised or full of excuses. There

D had formed the committee a few months before, part of a new effort to combat the old problem of just who had a right to Kenya, and why. White settlers had always been keen on self-rule, which amounted to something more like total domination of the territory.

We had both tried for the sun, and had fallen, lurching to earth again, tasting melted wax and sorrow. Denys wasn't hers, or mine.

I have fought for independence here, and freedom too. More and more I find they're not at all the same thing.

Maybe I've been unfair with her from the beginning, seeing her in a mirror and hating myself. She's been struggling to do the right thing, even when her own hurt has made that harder than it should ever

My mother in that awful parking lot, dead on Christmas Day. Jenny's murder and Eden's cancer. Hap's disappearance. My daughter's accident. The dark abyss of my work and how it connects in an awful and yawning way to everything else.

The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me, and it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it. Barely

We were involved for nearly five years. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of what I was doing and bolt away from him, my knapsack stuffed with the tattered draft of my first novel, meaning to finally get serious. But he quickly raced after me, again and again, and the same old chaos resumed.

Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined.

There's death in life, Anna, things too impossible to bear. So many things, and yet we bear them.

I haven't been drunk in over a year—not since my mother fell seriously ill—and I've missed the way it comes with its own perfect glove of fog, settling snugly and beautifully over my brain. I don't want to think and I don't want to feel,

I was thinking about how I had struggled and strained for years, as Karen had, and toward things that were disastrous for me. And maybe that was unavoidable. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me. And it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it.

I hoped that poor soul in the rowboat had found his way to shore. But not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved.

How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.

But what else is there? If we give up now, we're done for." "I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I'm old and doddering and can't remember feeling anything for anyone at all." She nodded. "You want to, but you won't.

that came when you knew that if life didn't go exactly

They're trying to kill me. Death by indignity, the nastiest kind of all.

All of that should have sent me running in the opposite direction, but I felt only intrigued, and then dazzled by his hunger for me, and the desperation we felt trying to be together when it was impossible. His wife, Marcelle, wouldn't grant a divorce.