Quotes About Struggle

God's people have no assurances that the dark experiences of life will be held at bay, much less that God will provide some sort of running commentary on the meaning of each day's allotment of confusion, boredom, pain, or achievement.

Joel gives a different take on this. He does not imply that blessing means elimination of obstacles and pain, but rather that God's presence, bringing one through these events, which are a natural concomitant to all human existence, is where blessing really resides.

Help is strangely, something we want to do without, as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavors, as if we cannot face how much we need in order to go on.

Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.

Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.

as Rilke said, 'Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can't see where I am. I've gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I'm fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there.

David has won everything he coveted and lost everything he cared for. This snapshot of agony sums up for generations the price of power, the intersection of family and public life, the way in which we injure ourselves and are then staggered by the pain.

Antidepressants. The thought of this girl actually being depressed made me want to grab the whole planet and throw it into the sun. Well, more than usual anyway.

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

Society is nothing more than people cooperating with other people they'd much rather murder.

To this day I don't know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

I feel stretched out, like too little butter scraped over too much waffle. And then it all falls down into one of the waffle holes and there's none left for the rest of the waffle and you sort of have to tilt it to make it run out.

A clean conscience is expensive, it's the reason most men have to live paycheck to paycheck.

You don't realize how terrifying the world can be for someone like that, someone who would rather stay in a familiar hole than an unfamiliar mansion.

You can lie to yourself, say that you never had a choice, that you weren't cut out for this. But deep down you'll know. You'll know that humans aren't cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, with a rusty knife.

all the king's doctors and all the king's pills couldn't make Frank's waking nightmares go away.

That's what it's like being poor—choices are something you sit around and dream about having, some day after you strike it rich.

A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn't change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.

What is it with rich people thinking they can starve the poor into good behavior?

I struggled for something to cling to, the way soldiers in foxholes picture their families, or a flag. My car, I thought crazily. This fucker crashed the Wongmobile. And for that, he must taste death.

Oh, hey, he'd figured out how to work the stupid ramp mechanism. It'd have been nice to have done that before he was forced to steal some guy's tow truck, but that was how every single possible thing had gone so far in this situation. Just a little bit behind the curve, a little slow to figure out the right thing. Story of his fucking life.

War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.