Quotes About Struggle

I learned what it was like to lose yourself. To feel the fragments flying off you. As if your soul has unhitched itself from your body and is flying away on a piece of string like a balloon. Lost in the clouds. You think, I only have to catch the end of the string. But though it hovers within sight, you cannot grasp it. You try and try. And then there comes a time when you are too tired. You no longer care. So you say: Let it go. Let me just fall down here on the soft grass and go to sleep.

And what is life without incident? Is such a life even possible?' He took a sip of his water: 'How do we become human except in the face of adversity?

in the absence of political order, human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The grey steel streets were indeed paltry (not our feelings, and no, not the blues) but those gray streets were dead and cold, despite our warm living selves celebrating the life in us dancing across their surfaces.

I have been a lot of places in my time, and done a lot of things. And there is a sense of Prodigal about my life that begs to be resolved. But one truth anyone reading these pieces ought to get is the sense of movement--the struggle, in myself, to understand where and who I am, and to move with that understanding.

The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.

The horizontal quality of black life, that is, the smashed flat quality of life for the oppressed, proposes that we is all generally equally mashed.

There are black men who love the white man so dearly, who love, I must suppose, the nice warm feeling of shoe sole on their woolly heads, that they would do nothing to see that the white man relinquishes his stranglehold on the world.

The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.

What would it be like if I had something to defend - a home, a country, a family - and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,' she said, 'But those who try to be strong, who try to build things - no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they?

I'm not "depressed," she said. Besides, I hate that word. OK, what should we call it? She fluffed the pillow behind her back, indignant. I'm very faithful to my problems.

I could never give it a name, my condition. I would have said, "I'm depressed," if that had felt sufficient. But I felt more than depressed. I felt that I was depression. A swallowed woman.

Michael and I both recognized we had problems, we just couldn't agree on the solution. I think what was happening was, I wasn't just talking about the implausible plan to walk away from our house and the kids' schools and Michael's job, no matter how assured we would be of getting these things back. I was wondering, whether we were to go or to stay, what would we do— about us?

Who is the forgotten man...? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.

Others were of humbler background: those farmers who found themselves forced to kill off their piglets in a time of hunger because FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordained they must;

Despair snuffs the sun from the firmament.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.

All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.

Success is sweet: the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.

The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule.

I wasn't a very good teacher.

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood.