Grappling Quotes - Page 2

• I don't believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security. I don't think they want more gridlock. I don't think they want more partisanship. I don't think they want more obstruction. They didn't send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive. That's not what they want. They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they're grappling with every single day.

  Barack Obama

  Jobs, Believe, Fighting

  Barack Obama's remarks at GOP House Issues Conference in Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. January 29, 2010.

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• Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed-- Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought-- Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer.

  George Eliot

  Love, Men, Soul

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.4145, Delphi Classics

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• We do live in an unsafe world. That's the truth. I'm dealing with that now, with my seven-year-old. He's grappling with the fact that the world is unsafe, and that there are people who do harmful things. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting that idea. We can't lie to our children and pretend that the world is perfect, and everybody's happy, and everybody's out there to do good. It's just part of a bigger conversation.

  Gwyneth Paltrow

  Children, Lying, Thinking

  "Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle and Sir Ben Kingsley Talk IRON MAN 3, the Future of the Franchise, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. April 26, 2013.

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• The receptive attitude enables one mind to fix itself to another as by spiritual grappling-irons. When you see that every word you utter us taken in, and weighed, and measured by your listener, you cannot free yourself from the influence of his presence. You are compelled to have in your thoughts not only the words you utter, but the man to whom they are spoken. You must not only talk, and talk well, but you must talk to him.

  Charles Dickens

  Spiritual, Attitude, Taken

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• Drop your false ideas.  See through people.  If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone.  Then you will love them.  Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

  Anthony de Mello

  Reality, Ideas, People

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• What I'm still grappling with and learning how to do is to be looking and thinking cinematically, having come from television.

  J. J. Abrams

  Thinking, Television, Stills

  "J.J. Abrams Talks STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, 3D, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 5, the FRINGE Finale, Future Projects, Maintaining Secrecy and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. January 6, 2013.

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• As a John Kerry supporter, I wanted to send him a check. But then it occurred to me that most of that money would end up in the hands of advertising agencies and television networks. And the money would be used to create deceptive commercials that flatter our point of view and shade the facts our way. And I wasn't comfortable with that. But on the other hand, that's how the game is played. You're always grappling.

  George Meyer

  Agency, Views, Hands

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• We need to get back into grappling with people we disagree with if we want to restore the Republic.

  Naomi Wolf

  People, Needs, Republic

  "Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?". Interview with Justine Sharrock, www.alternet.org. March 29, 2010.

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• With John Wick we wanted to do something like that. So rather than punching, kicks - and for the kind of way we wanted to shoot it, which is longer takes - our initial instinct was let's go with a throwing or grappling arm.

  Chad Stahelski

  Arms, Way, Punching

  Source: screenrant.com

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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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