Quotes About Struggle

Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.

But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect.

She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.

Ah, he would take her beyond---beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.

life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.

But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.

Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.

Each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind.

The words came out slowly, haltingly, as if they had cost him a struggle. Nan had noticed before now that anger was too big a garment for him; it always hung on him in uneasy folds.

Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together—that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls.

Every drop of blood in Lily's veins invited her to happiness.

Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of smart business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping.

But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety.

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement. (The Triumph Of The Night)

It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. But

the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.

There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

Odbacila sam par dobrih prilika na samom po?etku – pretpostavljam da to svaka devojka uradi, a znate da sam vrlo siromašna – i vrlo skupa.

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause