Quotes About Struggle

Waiting for an angel. Someone to ameliorate. Lift me over difficulties. I stop looking. My angel is me.

For example, people ask me about Eastman Kodak's slow disintegration and financial struggle. Let me tell you that people at Kodak knew where the wind was blowing. The decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography was no surprise to anybody who studied it intensively or was directly involved. Listen to your intuition and sell, or even better, don't invest in it at all. Selling

I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful, and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater, I was, in all likelihood, not going to find financial success.

Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.

We are caught together," he said, quoting Henry Beston, "in the net of life and time. We are fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

the therapy had indeed been troubling, for she had scratched the surface of her fears, and found beneath it a bottomless pit of anxiety and despair. The life she led was fraught with confusion, and she felt she no longer knew who she was. She remembered who she used to be and what she once wanted, but that was all gone now, and she could envision no future.

Seventeen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street—distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness and from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death.

If we are incapable of controlling our existence, life loses its meaning, too.

I saw myself like a piece of wood floating down a river, suddenly tossed against the shore, caught in a stagnant pool.

In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy Unfortunately he is a drug addict. Fortunately he is in recovery. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is in recovery again. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is not dead.

I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry...

Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs....

Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

Some people may opt out. Their child turns out to be whatever it is that they find impossible to face—for some, the wrong religion; for some, the wrong sexuality; for some, a drug addict. They close the door. Click. Like in mafia movies: "I have no son. He is dead to me." I have a son and he will never be dead to me.

At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.

It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people

It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.

Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy. Unfortunately he is a drug addict. Fortunately he is in recovery. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is in recovery again. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is in recovery again. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is not dead.

Nic begins writing hard, a word, I, two words, am, three words, sorry, writes them again, writes them again, writes them again, writes them again. He cannot, it seems, stop writing them. It is bullshit, a cheap attempt at - it is not bullshit, he is trying with excruciating desperation, which I can feel coming from him, to say something, to get out something that he cannot get out. It's easy to forget that no matter how hard it is for us, it is harder for him.