Quotes About Struggle

The odd thing is that fear and anxiety are running away from something, but they don't know what to run to. They know danger, but they don't know where to find peace and rest.

Then, when shame strikes, it is so nasty you have to numb yourself, and what better anesthetic than your addiction? It is the perfect vicious circle.

We can think that God is good, and we are pleased with him, though we might be pleased less with him than we are with the ease of our lives. Then, when life is hard—especially when life remains hard—the allegiances of our hearts

When your emotions feel muted or always low, when you are unable to experience the highs and lows you once did, the important question is not "How can I figure out what I have done wrong?" but it is, "Where do I turn—or, to whom do I turn—when I am depressed?" Some turn toward their beds and isolation; others turn toward other people. Some turn away from God; others turn toward him.

Even desperate people are slow to ask for help.

My wants are what concern me. That's where the battle must be fought. I

If addictions are really as prevalent as they seem, we would think that Scripture would be preoccupied with this struggle. And it is.

It is just to say that, for the addict, slavery with the object of desire is sometimes preferable to freedom without it.

Life in the kingdom isn't easy, at least not when we want to share the throne. But

Have you ever found yourself flirting with sexual temptation through a long gaze or sexual fantasies?

When addicts turn away from the Lord and gaze at the object of their desire, God becomes a distant memory. Since one common belief is that God is going to keep us from something good, we try to distract ourselves from remembering him.

This, however, is similar to God saying that the land belonged to Israel. They were promised the land, but they still had to fight for it. Furthermore, not all the battles were successful.

Screwtape warns Wormwood] Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's [God's] will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.4

As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.

It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.

I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.

We're all carrying our coffins with us every day." Or "We are all constantly cheating death.

They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us" (Danticat 19).

The soldiers can come and do with us what they want. That makes papa feel weak, she says. He gets angry when he feels weak.

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.

People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn't true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.

There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.

Nineteen Thirty-Seven