The struggle you’re in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow. Don’t give up.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

There’s plenty wrong with me. Take my blood, for example. I wish somebody would — this stuff is killing me!

Smile, because it confuses people. Smile, because it’s easier than explaining what is killing you inside.

All I have are negative thoughts.

You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it’s like to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? They don’t. They think

Holding your head up high when in struggle shows that you are a fighter who is not afraid to handle anything, rather than a scared victim who waits for others to provide help. Choosing to be a fighter instead of a victim allows us to live a life where we create our own happiness and meaning.

The only way to see the light at the end of the tunnel was to crawl through the mud in darkness.

The struggle is real, but it doesn’t last forever.

God hears and He sees, and you are not alone in your struggles. Remain firm and stable, for God has your deliverance planned.

Wow, I wonder what it’d be like to have a difficult life?

Most of them immigrants. These people came Promised Land. They came fresh & they got Destroyed.

If you’re absent during my struggle, don’t expect to be present during my success.

Don’t look down on yourself and on your life. Everyone goes through struggles, and they give us an opportunity to learn and grow as a person. Keep your head up so that you don’t miss any of the opportunities that are waiting for you.

Difficult times produce strong men and women. Keep on your struggle to achieve your dreams!

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

Sometimes I thought about my liver but my liver never spoke up, it never said, “Stop it, you’re killing me and I’m going to kill you!” If we had talking livers we wouldn’t need A.A.

Trying to be good made me sick.

Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had proceeded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn’t and the food wasn’t and the rent wasn’t. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: ‘HEY! KNOCK THAT OFF, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! WE’RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE’VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!’ With broom sticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines…

It was the next day. I had cancelled my appointment to speak before the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce. It was raining. The ceiling leaked. The rain dripped down through the ceiling and went “spat, spat, spat, a spat a spat, spat, spat, spat, a spat, spat, spat, a spat, a spat, a spat, spat, spat, spat…” The sake kept me warm. But a warm what? A warm zero. Here I was 55 years old and I didn’t have a pot to catch rain in. My father had warned me that I would end up diddling myself on some stranger’s back porch in Arkansas. And I still had time to make it.

Beasts bounding through time.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly.

I hate people who can go to sleep as soon as they close their eyes. Like, that takes me 4 hours, 600 position changes, and

If life is a bowl of cherries, then what am I doing in the pits?

Shigure Sohma: Ah, to be young like you people again: clumsily making your way through life, struggling so hard to keep your head above water

Everybody has bad days.

What… Am I doing? Fainting… Falling apart… Without even finding the way to break the curse. At this rate… The end will NEVER come.

If you want a good barber you have to deal with a busy barber.

Mostly everything gets worse before it gets better.

I have seen you struggling and yet to stand so strong. I pray to Lord to increase your strength and make you undefeatable. Good morning!

What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

I’m just an insomniac struggling for a night where I don’t dream of you anymore.

My old man

16 years old
during the depression
I’d come home drunk
and all my clothing–
shorts, shirts, stockings–
suitcase, and pages of
short stories
would be thrown out on the
front lawn and about the
street.

my mother would be
waiting behind a tree:
“Henry, Henry, don’t
go in . . .he’ll
kill you, he’s read
your stories . . .”
“I can whip his
ass . . .”

“Henry, please take
this . . .and
find yourself a room.”

but it worried him
that I might not
finish high school
so I’d be back
again.

one evening he walked in
with the pages of
one of my short stories
(which I had never submitted
to him)
and he said, “this is
a great short story.”
I said, “o.k.,”
and he handed it to me
and I read it.
it was a story about
a rich man
who had a fight with
his wife and had
gone out into the night
for a cup of coffee
and had observed
the waitress and the spoons
and forks and the
salt and pepper shakers
and the neon sign
in the window
and then had gone back
to his stable
to see and touch his
favorite horse
who then
kicked him in the head
and killed him.

somehow
the story held
meaning for him
though
when I had written it
I had no idea
of what I was
writing about.

so I told him,
“o.k., old man, you can
have it.”

and he took it
and walked out
and closed the door.
I guess that’s
as close
as we ever got.

You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive?

I don’t know. I’m already tired.

But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.

They had been afraid of the man with the beautifil eyes. And we were afraid then that all troughout our lives things like that would happen, that nobody wanted anybody to be strong and beautiful like that, that others will never allow it, and that many people will have to die.

When I came it was in the face of everything decent, white sperm dripping down over the heads and souls of my dead parents. If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women — good women — frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn’t strong. So I continued to struggle with women, with the idea of women.

the psyche has been burned
and left us senseless,
the world has been darker than lights-out
in a closet full of hungry bats,
and the whiskey and wine entered our veins
when blood was too weak to carry on;
and it will happen to others,
and our few good times will be rare
because we have a critical sense
and are not easy to fool with laughter.

Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.

I’m thankful for my struggle because without it I wouldn’t have stumbled across my strength.

Most women want a man who’s already successful. A strong woman will be part of his struggle, survive it, succeed together and build an empire.

For better it is to make a beginning of that which may lead to something, than to engage in a perpetual struggle and pursuit in courses which have no exit.

My father’s parents were sharecroppers who worked the land under the broiling Mississippi sun. Sharecroppers didn’t own the land they farmed. They paid rent to the landowner in whatever crops they raised and struggled to survive on what was left.

My daily conversation, it consists of hustle. Grinding from the bottom sick and tired of struggle.

He loves me. He loves all y’all, too. He just loves the school more. That’s the thing. He thinks busting us is good for the school and good for us. It’s the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.

The Lord that never forsake Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, will be with you through this present struggle and you shall be announced unharmed. Good morning, dear.

It’s a long struggle when you’re starting over.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

Insomnia is the violence of the night over a man.

My life has become an endless cycle of ‘I can’t sleep’ and ‘I can’t stay awake.’

I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.

At night, I can’t sleep. In the morning, I can’t wake up.

The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.

If there wasn’t struggle you would never grow. You would never become who you’re meant to be. And let’s be honest. It would also be… super boring both in movies and in life.