Quotes About Struggle

I didn't grow up in systemic poverty.

I am disappointed my grandchildren are growing up in a country still struggling to change. But it doesn't have to be this way. They don't have to live in a country infected with systemic racism.

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.

He felt now as if his entire body were recovering from frostbite, and he understood suddenly why people died in blizzards. It was not because they were cold and fell asleep. It was because it hurt too much to come back to life.

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Sheila made it sound simple, like everyone had one real self. But what if I didn't? Or what if my real self was no good? I kept imagining Angelica's face, half like usual, half not working right. Sometimes I felt like that on the inside, like I knew how I wanted to be, but it didn't match up with how I really was.

That's not what I mean. A lot of people make bad mistakes. But being in jail can make them feel like a mistake is all they are. Like they aren't even people anymore." Her bringing the chips and cookies

But Bridge understood that life didn't balance anymore. Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top.

The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.

For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.

Blood strikes back.

It's life. You don't figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.

I left home because I was hungry.

Dying is no big deal; the least of us will manage it. Living is the trick.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.

We were poor. If I wasn't a boy, I wouldn't have had nothing to play with.

I achieved what all artists dread: I had outlived most of my money and all of my talent.

When you feel the stitches holding the illusion of yourself together begin to stretch and pop, and you can't sew fast enough to keep the stuffing in.

Reed Farrel Coleman