Quotes About Struggle

days of spiritual dryness, doubt, and estrangement from God as "the dark night of the soul.

She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl wasn't it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.

Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.

It was war itself that was evil, not men.

Frobisher should perhaps have realized that Lottie was a woman who was resistant to salvage. She had risen and fallen like the tide, but she seemed to favour the ebb rather than the flow.

The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself from the grit. From the truth...

Jimmy, the baby produced to celebrate the peace after the war to end all wars, was about to fight in another one.

She wanted to be left alone in peace, to disappear into her own quiet world and meditate upon death. Death. Yes, she could form that blunt, obscene word too. But instead she was the one who was going to have to be kind and strong and say that everything was going to be all right (which it clearly was not) and that she had come to terms with it.

Sometimes, when she found herself mired in the twin duties of marriage and motherhood, she thought how her life had been compromised by love.

Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.

her. It was a cruel thing, trying to sprout and find the light of day. It was truth. She wasn't sure that she wanted it.

Didn't you hear, Jackson?" Julia said. "The class war's over. Everyone lost.")

She prayed now, with desperate conviction but no faith, and she suspected it made no difference either way. When

The war was a clumsily stitched

These were ideal conditions for the creation of his magnum opus, and Ramsay was hammering on the Remington's keys and shuttling its carriage with abandon, fuelled by nothing more than Lipton's tea and a tin of cocaine throat pastilles that he'd cadged off one of the dancers at the Sphinx.

You're trying to shore up a civilization that's in its death throes," Hugh said, as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. "There's really no point.

Because you couldn't make time, she'd been deluded about that. Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

It was a woman's job to try and improve a man. It was a man's job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

pointing. She was completely hopeless.

It was then that Teddy realised that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for the greater good. Birds thrown against a wall, in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break that wall.

That was the good thing about Julia, her family background was even more fucked up than his. They were a pair of freakishly bereaved people.

Rosemary was trying her best to retain good government in this family, against all the odds and without any help from a husband, for whom the quotidian demands of meals and housework and child care were meaningless

They had stepped into marriage in a frail barque that had long ago entered the doldrums and floundered in the deep. Miss Kelling, on the other hand, looked like someone who would steer a steady course. He had entangled his mind horribly in seafaring imagery, there seemed no way out of it except to abandon ship.