Quotes about Struggle

The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We're dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph. Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can't change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.

All the relatives, for no one could comprehend my frustration at having spent two years scratching the earth to make my fortune with no other goal than that of one day leading this girl to the altar, and death had stolen her away from me.

Despite all this, they considered themselves fortunate, because they were together. Other families had been split up; first the men had been taken off to what were known as relocation camps, then the women and children sent to another one. In some cases it was two or three years before they were reunited.

I have lived in a rough sea where waves would lift me and then drop me to the bottom.

This is a road I must travel bleeding.

They all agreed that under communism they had been just as poor, but at least there was food and security, whereas independence had brought them only ruin and abandonment.

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

How base a thing it is when a man will struggle with necessity! We have to die.

If you bear the cross unwillingly, you make it a burden, and load yourself more heavily; but you must bear it.

If you cast away one cross, you will certainly find another, and perhaps a heavier.

'Mean to' don't pick no cotton.