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Exlpore more Struggle quotes

"The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world-a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life."

"Thought-he told himself quietly-is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense."

"She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life."
Explore more quotes by Sue Monk Kidd


"Don't be telling me--can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is."


"Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real."


"But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward."


"The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life."


"From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac."


"There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, 'Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind. She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, 'You don't believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?'We weren't some special people who had lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it."


"I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me."


"I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to."


"I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men."
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