Quotes About Struggle

The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Enduring what couldn't be cured, she supposed, was what people meant by being adult, though it was ironic that so few of them—including her parents—had mastered the skill themselves.

Anne herself was no stranger to adversity, but she had always hated any situation that could only be endured. She was able to summon the necessary courage for a bold, confident stroke, but simply getting by left her dispirited, and it seemed that the older she got, the more frequent these situations became.

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till and bolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: "Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true.

Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?

The fact that the two were friends added a bittersweet quality and made the whole thing seem even more noble. The fact that so much damage had been traded over a girl elevated the contest into the realm of heroism.

Indeed, a good hint that you've entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up.

It's just that living with him—being married to him— is like being covered with these little cuts all the time. There's no big gash you can show anybody, nothing they'd believe would really hurt. But these damn little nicks, they suck the blood right out of you.

Even to my mother, her hard-won autonomy must at times have resembled a cage. Still, it was a cage of her own design, different from and superior to the one my father and her parents, and Gloversville itself ,would have put her in, if she'd allowed them to.

But for some reason, these periods of melancholy were important to him, and he rode them out the way some people did migraines.

We stood facing each other. White witch doctor against black witch doctor. Hero against Villain—or so I liked to think of it, at least. Who would win? Would Civilization be saved? Equally important, would I?

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he's still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he's still left with his hands.

I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.

You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened. Your co-workers ask if everything's okay and you tell them you're just tired. And you're trying to smile. And they're trying to smile.

Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn't. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don't, they'll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.

You're falling now. You're swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing.

It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all. Charles

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.

You can't make me do nothing but die!