Quotes About Struggle

Raquel's mother had driven her fiercely to do well in school, such that high academic prowess had been the only option. Others had come upon money by luck, or had relatives acting as patrons. Rob had had none of those things. All he'd had was a home, and a harried home at that, paired with his own drive. What he'd achieved, he'd achieved almost exclusively on his own.

A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.

half the generation already lost, the other half just trying to get home each day.

If you go into something, you better make it hard. Otherwise what's the point?

Look, anything you do, if it isn't hard, it isn't doing anything for you. So you're better off not doing it. Use your time somewhere else.

Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he'd thought he would make, inhabiting the home he'd thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he'd thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier.

But a deeper transition affected people of color in this dazed context. Before course selections and extra-curricular sign-up sheets, before bags could even be unpacked in rooms, black students had to situate themselves within their own race. The process was complicated, conflicting, usually silent, highly fraught, and wholly invisible to their white classmates. Most of whom had never actively had to consider the role of race in their lives.

Looking back now, it is easy to feel as if she alone knew that success and happiness in life were more elusive even than an Ivy League diploma.

The student body, too, felt more diverse. Rob spoke often of "real people" with his friends, by which he meant people who struggled, like they all did. On the Ivy League campus visits, any sense of daily or long-term struggle had seemed airbrushed. At Johns Hopkins––and maybe he was only imagining this because of the Ivy League stigma absent in Baltimore––Rob believed the average student had worked harder and sacrificed more to be there.

On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.

Brave is a mental illness you get when you're desperate. Sometimes it lasts for less than a minute. Sometimes it sticks with you forever, like leprosy or TB. It all depends on how many times you have to carry the condition around in your head.

If being any kind of hero falls all the way down to men like you, then we have already lost.

Your self-esteem is lowered. You feel powerless and frustrated. You sabotage your success. You lead an uneventful, boring life.

It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. — Seneca

I'll be famous one day, but for now I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons." - Greg Heffley,

I know I need to eat healthier, but if you take fast food out of my diet I'm in big trouble, because I'm probably something like 95% chicken nugget.

it turns the shower scene was a lot harder to film than i expected

In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toin and suffering.

I am unlovable...I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even - in my sillier moments - in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting or one of Those Nights comes along.

Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating.

ONE DISCOVERY It is easy to go down into Hell Ã¢â'¬Â¦; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air—there's the rub.… —VIRGIL, Aeneid

A bird painted not with beauty but with all the dirt and wounds collected in a long hard life, in battle, in love, with torn feathers and a busted leg and a chipped beak and one of its eyes half closed; and yet a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that.

anything worth having is worth paying that price for.