Quotes About Struggle

I was vaguely aware that we'd been archenemies a few minutes before, and now he had me on my back on the sand.

I had cancer, you fuck!

He ran his hands through his hair and held on to the back of his neck both biceps bulging. Dang him for looking so hot when I wanted to run away

And strangely, even though he still stared at the store, I felt like I had more self-control then he did right then.

And I was bitter. Bitterness and I were old friends by now, but at the moment bitterness was trying to go down my bra in public.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer's block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.

You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder.

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet....

The seconds pass. I know what's going on because it's the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I love or want or need, and I'll find a way to grind it into dust.

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing - being right - gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking into bits. She was coming apart at the seams … my head buzzing with a confusion of junk noise, white noise, space junk, a junkyard of noisy thought that made me long instead for a lovely, petaled silence.

Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she'd banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life's work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect.

Let me tell you something, dearie: the world is a closed door to an unwed mother and her illegitimate child. If

Phoebe burst into tears. For several minutes she stood weeping in the middle of the road, the choking, gulping sobs of childhood. Something was wrong; something was wrong but she didn't know what. She was alone in the middle of nowhere, behaving strangely, with no one around to help her, and what people were around she wanted only to escape.

Problems he couldn't solve made him angry.

In Naples, there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you though, maybe they will. What I'm saying is, we're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?

At times the brusque mass of everything that was not him seemed likely to crush Eddie into dust the way he crushed the dried-out moths that collected in piles on the protectory

until it seemed like everything in Danny's life was the witness he needed to prove he was still himself, still Danny King exactly like before: See, I scored a goal! See, I'm hanging with my friends! But he wasn't one hundred percent there, he was watching, too, hoping everyone would be convinced.

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time. Fuck Sasha, I thought.

Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny, and it sure as hell was easier to land than a decent apartment.