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My Struggle Quotes

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My Struggle Quotes

“Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath from a small mouth. And oh, wasn't the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one's own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?”

“I am alive, I have my own children and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father. They aren’t. I know that. When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don't look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.”

“Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?” he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian. But he is really wondering about this. I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that. I shake my head. “It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.”

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length, we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty...Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.”

“The trick was to eke out the milk because if you came to the last and there was none left it was almost impossible to swallow. Best of all, of course, was to save a drop until everything was eaten, the milk never tasted as good as then, when it no longer had to fulfill a function, kit ran down your throat in its own right, pure and uncontaminated, but unfortunately it was rare for me to manage this. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.”

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.”

“You reminded me of a quote that my acting teacher Stella Adler wrote in her book ['The Art of Acting'], which I asked her to sign: "The young actor feels some greatness inside themselves that they want to give back to the world." That resonated with me, but I didn't really understand what she was talking about until much later, in the way you surmised that my struggle to become an actor was from being this kind of introverted young boy.”

“I just didn't feel very good. One day I woke up and I was like: "All right. I'm going to start eating right. I'm going to start working out." I figured it might help me feel a little bit better - even if I was still sick, it might help me move forward with my struggles. I just kind of turned a corner.”

“If it wasn't for this person's privacy, I'd be able to talk pretty freely about this subject on a personal level. The record's about not her. It's about my struggles through years of dealing with the aftermath of lost love and longing and just mediocrity and just bad news, like life stuff. And in the [record], where the title comes from, the lyrics are actually a conversation between me and another girl, not this Emma character.”

“My struggles have been around protecting our air quality, protecting people from mercury in fish. I was very involved in the effort to get the FDA to recognize that mercury in fish is a real health issue and the FDA, you know, needed to be on that. But they were very tight with the fishing industry and did not want the public to be aware in the same way that they later didn't want the public to be aware of the problems with Vioxx, and they sat on the studies for many years and allowed 140,000 people to develop heart disease.”

“I knew that the black struggle wasn't my struggle. But I felt like it was my-struggle-adjacent, you know? I've always said that if you turn the dial in one direction, a Muslim is a Jew is an East Asian person is a Native American and so on. I feel very much that all of these struggles are kind of the same and - Hillary Clinton actually said this recently - when you get rid of one barrier, it opens up the gates for a whole bunch of people you didn't even know would benefit from it. So not fighting for the black struggle is like not fighting for the Muslim struggle.”

“I don't go and study other folks. I come from where I came from, as a kid, in the little black church I grew up in. And some of the things they did I rejected, because I could see that it was a manipulation and an exaggeration. My struggle is never to fool folks; to keep it authentic - who we are and who we are becoming - rather than to mimic or to translate what others do into my own terms.”

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.”

“One of my struggles is that I'm a glutton. There's always those very simple, long, old-ass things, but they're very real to me, and I'm sitting in them, and they're swirling in my mind all the time. I tell people about it and they think, "Why don't you just go and make some money, go get a big-screen TV, or look at the Internet." Or they say, "Go create some introspective art." I just want to explode. I don't know how everybody else is able to walk around so calm. It's amazing to me when I see people walking so calmly down the street. I envy them, but I also kind of hate them.”

“My struggle now is with these red carpets. It is still really hard to get people to design for me. It's frustrating because you feel like you're the minority. You feel this pull of what it means to be "sample size" and you're not that and most designers don't have anything that fits. It's so important to continuously put billboards where people see curvy women and know that we are here and we deserve to be designed for. We deserve to spend our money on expensive stuff if we want.”

“My path to poetry was slow and meandering. When I eventually found my way to graduate school at 29, making a life as a poet seemed like a bohemian fantasy. But maybe my zigzagging trajectory is just an excuse for tardiness, when fear is really the root of any reason I might give. My perfectionism and pace are certainly driven by fear that a poem is imperfect or incomplete. More significantly, my struggle to fully dedicate myself to poetry was a fear of failure.”