Quotes About Struggle

But the trouble with falling in love was that it was involuntary, no matter how well you knew it was a bad idea, if it was going to happen, it happened, and you couldn't prevent it, however much you wanted to.

She tried to sound casual and upbeat but in her heart she felt a sudden bleakness.

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed.

One learns from girlhood to fear the competitive energy, the ambient fury and resentment that can be aimed at powerful females. And yet at the same time, women often want or need power. The goal, then, is to take power in a way that navigates that rage or resentment; it is a little like trying to feed a dragon without getting burned.

Ever since childhood, I've felt a tension between who I think I should be-- smarter, more confident, more creative, more adventurous, more out going- and who I am: quiet, introspective, sensitive, and solitary. If I could only be better, I think- a better wife, a better mother, a better writer, a better human- then I would feel more sure of myself and more worthy. More deserving of life.

I'll either get a medal or get committed.

After a moment, Quentin asked, How long had it been since you'd been completely off medications? Diana didn't really want to tell him, but finally said, The first medications were prescribed when I was eleven. From that point on, there was always something, usually more than one drug at a time. But always something. I'm thirty-three now. You do the math. More than twenty years. You've spent two-thirds of your life drugged. Just about into oblivion, she agreed.

A novel in progress doesn't have a clear, forward process. It's messy, like a beloved, balky child.

I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.

the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

I lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.

Often, people want both to live and to die; ambivalence saturates the suicidal act.

Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me.

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it.

I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been. It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of a life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.

Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony.

The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have.

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.

Because the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping.

I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.

Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water. I