Quotes About Struggle

For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.

The course of true love was never easy.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The course of true love never did run smooth; But, either it was different in blood, O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low. Or else misgraffed in respect of years, O spite! too old to be engag'd to young. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends, O hell! to choose love by another's eye.

Divorce is probably as painful as death.

My dad died of a stroke.

The thread that has run through my life is loneliness. Even as a child I was never part of a group. I don't know why. It was not by choice. Maybe because I was Jewish in a predominantly non-Jewish school. But I was fighting all the time. I had very few friends.

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.

When a farm or a family is stricken, nature destroys what humankind has made. Houses peel and crumble. Tilled fields are subsumed by weeds and grasses. Well-tended orchards become knotted, spectral forests. The earth, given an opening, always reclaims itself and obliterates order—erasing the outward evidence of an agrarian society.

There may be losses too great to understand That rove after you and--faint and terrible-- rip unknown through your hand.

Never had he been subjected to such rude treatment. How long could it last? How long, he wondered, could he abide it?

World War II had marked "the supreme triumph of man in his long battle with the scarcities in nature." By

The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they'll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts

all on my own up on some roof with no options, no choices, just boxed in on every side between different things that I don't want - that nobody would want.

Everybody is tense. Tad does his best to