Quotes About Struggle

Besides, I can't, I no longer have the strength to destroy this painful piece of myself, which might turn out to be the piece I value most.

Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.

Ime te bolesti je: Mašta. To je -- crv, koji grize crne bore na ?elu. To je groznica koja vas tjera da tr?ite sve dalje -- iako to 'dalje' po?inje tamo gdje završava sre?a. To je -- posljednja barikada na putu prema sre?i. Radujte se: ona je ve? raznesena. Put je slobodan.

It just goes against nature for a thinking and seeing being to live among these irregularities and unknown X's. It is as if someone blindfolds you and then makes you walk around like that and you feel your way around, stumbling, and you know that there is an edge somewhere very nearby and that it would only that one step for the only thing left of you to be a flattened, mangled piece of meat. Isn't that just about the same thing I'm going through?

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist

One day Plapa told us about irrational numbers, and, I remember, I cried, banged my fists on the table, and screamed, "I don't want V-1"!! Take V-1 out of me!" That irrational root grew in me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me, and you couldn't make sense of it or neutralize it, because it was completely beyond ratio.

But how was I going to explain my whole being, this whole disease that I've been jotting down in these pages? So I shut up and went along peacefully. A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden gust of wind falls peacefully downward, but on the way it twists, catches at every twig, offshoot, branch that it knows. That is just how I caught at each silent spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the light blue needle of the Accumulator Tower as it thrust up into the clouds.

Does everyone have a pain that can be wrested from within only along with their heart, and does everyone have to do something before....

What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

I walked alone through the twilit street. The wind was whirling, driving, carrying me like a slip of paper. Fragments of cast-iron sky flew and flew-they had another day, two days to hurtle through infinity… The unifs of passersby brushed against me, but I walked alone. I saw it clearly: everyone was saved, but there was no salvation for me. I did not want salvation …"(c)

But how explain all of myself, all of my sickness, recorded in these pages? And I subsided and walked obediently. ... A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden blast of wind obediently falls downward, but on the way it whirls, catches at every familiar branch, fork, knot And I, too, was catching at every silent spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the blue spire of the Accumulator Tower piercing a cloud.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. ("A Story About The Most Important Thing")

I learned in the course of time that the mind is a lifebuoy.

Trouble is to man what rust is to iron

True poverty does not come from God.

No matter how much I prove and prod, I cannot quite believe in God; But oh, I hope to God that He Unswervingly believes in me.

The struggle to get weapons is continuous, but the United States will aid us, if it finds Israel displaying a willingness for peace.

This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness.

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.

Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.

The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in- + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one's life, but that the only way to end the pain - that eternal fight against one's melodrama so that it does not transgress - is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments - Mann's or anyone's - on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.