We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.
It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.
It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
For me giving up is way harder than trying.
If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
I hate that word – “lucky.” It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes – I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me.
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
We can’t learn without pain.
There is no education like adversity.
Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
The courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.
If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.
I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.