Grappling Quotes - Page 2

• If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it’s really finished as a force for grappling with the world.

  J. M. Ledgard

  Class, Fiction, World

  "'There Is Another World in Our World': A Conversation with J. M. Ledgard" by Philip Gourevitch, www.newyorker.com. April 30, 2013.

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• Difficulty is a nurse of greatness-a harsh nurse, who rocks her foster children roughly, but rocks them in strength and athletic proportion. The mind, grappling with great aims and wrestling with mighty impediments, grows by a certain necessity to the stature of greatness.

  Kobe Bryant

  Children, Wrestling, Greatness

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• When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Ideas, Parent

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.91, Convergent Books

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• A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

  Alan Ryan

  Book, Two, People

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• I've really been grappling with depression. It's all linked with my cocaine and ecstasy abuse.

  Robbie Williams

  Abuse, Mental Illness, Cocaine

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• She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

  Toni Morrison

  Love, Country, Children

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

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• There's something to play if there's conflict going on. Whatever that conflict is, that's where drama is; if the character is grappling with something you've got something to play, there's layers to it.

  Clive Owen

  Drama, Character, Play

  "He's a bit of an idiot but I did like him" by Laura Barton, www.theguardian.com. January 26, 2006.

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• Sometimes my poetry is an attempt to keep off existential terror; sometimes it is a grappling with philosophical problems; sometimes just fun.

  Gwen Harwood

  Fun, Philosophical, Poetry

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• You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!

  Homer

  Running, War, Heart

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• The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Lying, Responsibility, Roots

  Aung San Suu Kyi, University of Oxford. Refugee Studies Programme (1993). “Towards a true refuge”

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• Humans have changed little over time. We think we've invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism.

  Robert Harris

  Thinking, Issues, Years

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• I was crying and laughing, snuffing tears and blood, bumping at him with my bound hands, trying awkwardly to thrust them at him so that he could cut the rope. He quit grappling, and clutched me so hard against him that I yelped in pain as my face was pressed against his plaid. He was saying something else, urgently, but I couldn’t manage to translate it. Energy pulsed through him, hot and violent, like the current in a live wire, and I vaguely realized that he was still almost berserk; he had no English.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Pain, Cutting, Blood

  Diana Gabaldon (2015). “The Outlander Series 8-Book Bundle: Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, An Echo in the Bone, Written in My Own Heart's Blood”, p.4706, Dell

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• Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.

  Lauren Oliver

  Roots, Stronger, Way

  Lauren Oliver (2015). “Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem”, p.294, Hachette UK

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• Thorne blinked at her, then down at the sewage he could barely make out in the darkness. "Don't you have some tool in that fancy hand of yours that can get us across?" Cinder glared, light-headed from her body's instinctively short breaths. "Oh, wow, how could I have forgotten about my grappling hook?

  Marissa Meyer

  Light, Hands, Darkness

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• I'll wager I would have screwed things up regardless. But. . .can you imagine those poor bastards grappling their prey, leaping over the rails, swords in hand, screaming, 'Your cats! Give us all your gods-damned cats!

  Scott Lynch

  Cat, Hands, Giving

  Scott Lynch (2015). “The Gentleman Bastard Series 3-Book Bundle: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, The Republic of Thieves”, p.1112, Random House

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• You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

  Ralph Fletcher

  Real, Writing, Learning

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• Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

  Paul Engle

  Writing, Thinking, Water

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• One of the unspoken themes that I'm grappling with in Day of Honey is the relationship between violence and cosmopolitanism. It's one thing to comprehend violence as an outgrowth of ignorance, poverty, and backwardness. It's another matter entirely to confront incredible atrocities in a country with a rich civic and intellectual life.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Country, Ignorance, Intellectual

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If you're dealing with grappling [with] problems of feeding people, the biggest impact in fertility reduction is girls' schools. Schooled girls make a bigger impact on that than any other factor - not these various regulations [such as] you have to have one child or that. It turns out that none of these are effective.

  Amartya Sen

  Girl, Children, School

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I seem to have three categories of readers. The first is nonbelievers who are glad that I am reading the Bible so they don't have to bother. The second group, which is quite large, is very Biblically literate Jews. And the third, which is also very large, is Christians, most of them evangelical. The evangelical readers and the Jewish readers have generally been very encouraging, because they appreciate someone taking the book they love so seriously, and actually reading it and grappling with it.

  David Plotz

  Christian, Book, Reading

  "Biblically Speaking". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

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• One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Bridges, Important, Fiction

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition”, p.136, University of Chicago Press

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• See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive intelligent manner.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Running, Intelligent, Reacting

  Maxwell Maltz (2016). “Psycho-Cybernetics Deluxe Edition: The Original Text of the Classic Guide to a New Life”, p.74, Penguin

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• I love to exercise my creativity in many ways but as each year of specialization goes by I feel further and further from my other creative selves. I used to be able to see myself doing many things and sometimes I still long for a job that involves less pressure and grappling with people but, as you say, I am one of the lucky ones so I try to just focus on feeling lucky and carry on!

  Ani DiFranco

  Jobs, Creativity, Exercise

  Interview with Mary Ann Rossoni, get-ri.com. September 1, 2015.

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• My mother was a trained nurse, and she'd tell me that patients would fight as they were administered anaesthetic, grappling to get the gas mask off their face.

  Maeve Binchy

  Mother, Fighting, Nurse

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• Men have discovered their distinctive virtues and vices through grappling with the perennial dilemmas and demands of love, courage, pride, family, and country-the five paths whose proper ordering gives us the key to the secret of happiness for a man.

  Waller R Newell

  Country, Pride, Men

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