Quotes About Struggle

hard-won things are more valuable than those that come too easily.

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster When you take your pill it's like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside you.

It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.

I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

Even though we often mess up, most of us are doing the best that we know how with the circumstances that surround us.

Divinity students always fought in these peaked caps, as a scar would terminate their careers.

Her ambition was an extremely distressing condition. She sought power the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover.

How can I continue to live, he shouted at high scream under the nave of his encompassing skull,

How can I continue to live, he shouted at high scream under the nave of his encompassing skull, if people are going to continue to carry bundles of pain on top of their heads like Haitian laundresses, then fling the bundles at random into the face of any bright stroller who happened to be passing by?

My larger point is that since each of us struggles daily with good and bad impulses, we might want to restructure our social institutions in order to make it a little easier to be good.

We have lost our faith in the powers that brought us this far—the powers of will, imagination, effort, and community.

Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.

Just as police and fire sirens reminded New Yorkers they were home, the sound of car bombs reminded me I was in Baghdad, which had become home for me. I was like a battered wife who can't leave the man abusing her. I had moved into stage four and assumed, as a matter of math, that I was going to die in Baghdad. But still I wanted to stay.

I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.

I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad's government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse.

I envy the happiness of others... I envy the sense of belonging... I seem always to be remaking myself.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

It's hard knowing that one bag of heroin, one mile away, would help me forget it all.

For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.

She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life.

He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?

The God way. Talking about God this and God that. Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be his name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fuck God for not saving us, fuck God for not being here and for not saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.