Quotes About Struggle

All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.

creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?

most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.

I am not an expert at praying, as you know. But can you please help me? I am in desperate need of help. I don't know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell me what to do...

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.

The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it.

If I'd had any way of knowing that things were- as Lily Tomlin once said- going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I'm not sure how I would have slept that night.

She knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact.

One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried her best to ignore it.

Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.

how could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn't it? Reunited with fresh hopes, we'd share a few deliriously happy days together. Or sometimes even weeks.

So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked. 'Sometimes people live there for years,'I said.

I agree--the world isn't a nursery. But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort. (53)

I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried- in neat little rows- the personal dreams they have given up for their families

I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.

Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in - predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.

debt will always be the abattoir of creative dreams.

Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place.

She felt listless, tragic, and slightly murderous. She was irritable and prickly with exactly those people who were the kindest to her.