Quotes About Struggle

addicted to a rate of stimulations per second that she hasn't entirely kicked.

People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

She fights to hold on to the thing she has just glimpsed. But traffic, bickering, business: the street's brutality begins to close in. She walks faster, on the brink of the old panic. Everything she has just won begins to fade again into the irresistible force of other people.

People. So much pain.

the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.

1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

He'll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except in the daily life she leads. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself.

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils.

His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.

His problem, his son believed, was "too many irons in the fire": a nice cliché for an industrialist and inventor who worked with kilns. "One by one, his inventions fell into other hands, some by fair sale, but most of them by piracy, when it became known that he had nothing left wherewith to maintain his rights. In short, with seven children to provide for, he found himself a ruined man."12

Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life: he has the need to fight and to encounter danger.

a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I've had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I've lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It's in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

the ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.