Quotes About Struggle

I love you, he said flatly. I--love--you. Shall I elaborate? I have loved you. I do love you. I will love you. I didn't want to love you. I tried not to love you. I will undoubtably regret loving you, but--God help me--I love you--so much.

We all know how ruthlessly these American millionaires crush their rivals as they climb to power.

unnecessary discomfort is a form of martyrdom with which I have no sympathy.

We could not have been more firmly dismissed. Emerson bowed in silence, and I felt a certain … well, perhaps embarrassment is the proper word. For the first time I could see the priest's point of view. The strangers had moved into his town, told his people they were wrong, threatened his spiritual authority, and he had no recourse, for the strangers were protected by the government. A way of life centuries old was passing; and he was helpless to prevent it.

marred by deep lines of

Did Appomattox signify the triumph of right over wrong or of might over right?

He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.

He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)

Rose's own experience was that goodness, the state of being good, was only reached with difficulty and pain. It took a long time to get to it; in fact one never did get to it, or, if for a flashing instant one did, it was only for a flashing instant. Desperate perseverance was needed to struggle along its path, and all the way was dotted with doubts.

Those years in the back diningroom, like some dark tunnel through which one emerges into sunshine, had ended for her in glory. All the time she had been so miserable, she had really been heading straight for this. She was awestruck. Such great and unexpected blessings should bring forth fruit, she vowed, and she would show her gratitude by seeing to it that they did.

This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,' I remarked, and I wondered what those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the banter of publicans.

The evil times had come of eking out, of making do. At least, my husband seemed to regard the times we had arrived at as evil, but that was because he was in the unfortunate position of having a past to compare them with. I, who had practically no past, and whose family had never fallen from glory for the reason that it had had no glory to fall from, thought the times wholly delightful; and anyhow I rather liked camphor.

America's middle class is under attack. Worse, it's not under attack by some unstoppable force of nature. It's in trouble because the game is deliberately rigged.

This one-two punch—flat incomes and rising expenses—has hit the middle class squarely in the gut. Beginning

America's middle class was under attack.

Medical problems, job losses, and family breakups had laid these families low. Most had hung on and tried to repay long past any reasonable chance of doing so. As I saw it, the families in bankruptcy were mostly good people caught in a bad situation

I loved my mother. I wanted her to smile, to believe that I was doing the right thing. But that wasn't going to happen. So I ducked my head and kept on going.

I'm happy that the GDP is up and unemployment is down. Yay! But I'm not drinking champagne. In fact, I'm hitting alarm buttons everywhere I can. Our once-solid middle class is in mortal danger—in danger and running out of time. Every one of those happy numbers is used by nearly every economic reporter and pundit and politician, but those numbers paper over the fact that America's middle class is literally disappearing. NO

What happened is an economic boa constrictor that is squeezing working families so hard they can't breathe. Gina

We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don't live in some fairy tale—they live in today's reality. *

If you don't fight, you can't win.

If ever there was a time to fight, this was it.