Quotes About Struggle

Did I believe in God? Now the test had come. I was alone. There was no salary to earn, no golden opinions to consider. God offered me only suffering—would I continue to love Him?

God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you've started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right", and "Whatever you think is best", and "you're the most wonderful and valuable thing int he world", and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people.

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he'd walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves.

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce.

A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

It always seemed to me," she said at last, "that it must require a great deal of courage to be an artist, if only because the creative process is such a lonely one. I should imagine it must be all the more difficult for a woman.

Oh-h-h-h— Hidey, tidey, Christ Almighty Who the hell are we? Flim, flam, God damn We're the infantry…

Sometimes in dreams there are visions of the past. For that reason Alice Prentice had always welcomed sleep, but she suffered an insomniac's dread of the time just before sleeping, the act of falling asleep itself, the perilous twilight of semi-awareness when the mind must struggle for coherence, when a siren or a cry in the street is the very sound of terror and the ticking of the clock is a steady reminder of death.

Aveva vinto, ma non si sentiva vincitore. Era riuscito a raddrizzare il corso della propria esistenza, ma si sentiva più che mai vittima dell'indifferenza del mondo. Non sembrava giusto.

He had torn a ragged wound in it, laying open its moist white meat, but it wouldn't break, it wouldn't give, and it made the children laugh each time the shovel bounced and rang in his hands. The delicate noise of their laughter, the look of their tulip-soft skin and of their two sunny skulls, as fragile as eggshell, made a terrible contrast to the feel of biting steel and shuddering pulp, and it was his sense of this that made his eyes commit a distortion of truth.

There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother's throat.

With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people.

My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask.

All right," her voice said bleakly. "All right, suppose all this is true. Suppose I'm acting out a compulsive behavior pattern, or whatever they call it. So what? I still can't help what I feel, can I?

Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn't she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?

Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before - pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat - but it was no use.

The sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room. A woman's only son came home insane, confronting her with God only knew what agonies of grief and guilt, and still she busied herself with the doings of the zoning board, with little chirrups of neighborly good cheer and cardboard boxes full of garden plants.

How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you've lost all your belief in yourself?

If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren't you almost certain to become a proletarian too?

I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.