Nellie Clark's 'Spoon River Anthology'

Regardless of who you are, where you come from or what you do, everyone faces difficulties in their lives. This statement could easily define the very meaning of SE Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, which can be summed up in the phrase ‘things are rough all over.’ This is a metaphor used very early on in the book by Cherry Valance when she and Ponyboy Curtis discuss the differences between their two social groups (pg 43). It means that everyone falls upon difficult times no matter what. I will be exploring how things are hard for three characters in The Outsiders, Johnny, Randy and Darry.

Life isn't worth living if you are not willing to accept the challenges thrown your way. How I grew up wasn't easy. It, instead, was rousing from being adopted out of China, learning a new culture, to facing some hindrance. Nevertheless, I couldn't have done this on my own. With the help of God all things are possible.

easy life and Mrs Johnston has a hard life and has to work hard to

Lizabeth begins to talk about what her family life is like. The passage states,”I did not notice my father’s silence, for he was always silent these days, nor did I notice my mother’s absence, for she always worked well into evening.” (220). Lizabeth’s family life has a huge influence on why she does not want to grow up. Seeing what her parents have to live through prevent her from having any hope and indirectly characterizes her as hopeless. That night, Lizabeth hears her parents arguing about how hard living is. She hears her father break down into tears (221). This was the last straw for Lizabeth. After hearing what her parents had to say in their conversation, she comes to the conclusion that if her life is not fair, then the life of others should not be fair either. The conclusion that Lizabeth comes to indirectly characterizes her as depressed as she feels as if her life is empty. Her conclusion also further develops Lizabeth’s self-centered character trait. Although there are people that have life worse than Lizabeth, she does not view it that way.

"Stay strong things will get better, it might be stormy now, but it can't rain forever". Sometimes in life you are given something that makes you say "what" and "what am I supposed to do now"? But you can get through it. Life is full of obstacles and people always find ways through it. This lesson is found everywhere, even in books. This lesson is found in, Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson. The books about a young girl named Mattie and her family that goes through the fever of 1793. Through the fever they had a lot of different obstacles but they got through them together. One of the themes I found in this book is "when obstacles come upon your life you can get through them" this is showed by the character Mattie and Grandfather.

When people go through something difficult it can change them. Making them who they are, it can change them for the bad or good. Therefore, hardships can greatly influence a person’s life by making them appreciate all the things that make life enjoyable.

Our Life is a matter of choices. Live well and have faith and it will never go wrong. Our lives can be full of crazy ups and downs that shape our views on how life should be lived. With a similar ideology, author Flannery O’Connor’s depicts her own life struggles using different aspects and details throughout her novels and short stories. O’Connor lived by the basis that life must go on no matter the hardships. In her novels she represented various characters who made wrong choices and due to those choices suffered extreme negative consequences. Despite her struggles, O’Connor made the choice to continue on in her life yet many of her novels contradicted that same idea by having characters in her novels and short stories suffer consequences for making the wrong choices. Because the

According to Marian Erickson, “Most of life is choices, and the rest is pure dumb luck.” Real people’s lives depend on this quote everyday, which leads to the outcome of each problem individuals face. In the passages, characterization of the main personas helps one understand the theme. Conflict and symbolism also help lead to the overall idea that life is not always guaranteed to be full of success. The book The Other Wes Moore, the poem “If,” and the informational text “The Art of Resilience” all share a common theme of how choices and luck contribute to the success of life.

Reading the book, The Other Side of the River, by Alex Kotlowitz, the author writes about the relationship between two towns in Michigan, and the death of a young boy named Eric McGinnis. The two towns, Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, are called the “Twin Cities”, but are ironically not related in any way. St. Joseph is 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and is 92 percent black. Throughout the book Kotlowitz questions the residents from both towns and how they are affected by the environment around them. The author also starts with the climax on the first page of the book – the death of Eric, and uses this as an technique to tell the story of the disagreements between the two towns.

In life there will always be those moments that we most value and those that we wish to avoid. Misfortunes are the situations or events that we wish to vanish from our lives because we view them in a negative way. However, what many choose to avoid is actually something that defines who we are. Misfortunes develop one’s character and it identifies us as a person. Everyone goes through different situations and because of that each and every person develops their own unique character based on those misfortunes. The essays “Flavio’s Home” by Gordon Parks, “What I’ve Learned From Men” by Barbara Ehrenreich, and “Common Decency” by Susan Jacoby all explain to us in detail the situation that a particular person is going through which in the end reveals how the person’s character was developed by that misfortune.

Life in its ever-evolving glory seems at times to be nothing more than a serious of random events that lead us from one place to another. It takes many years of grace and wisdom to see that life is much more than that. Life is far bigger than any one person or group of people. Life is a lesson and sometimes lessons need to repeat. Life during the time of Walt Whitman was oddly and sadly similar

Everyone seems to think the kind of hardship you’ve been thru describes your character. But in reality, it is what you do with that hardship that really shows it. In Margaret Peterson Haddix’s “Running out of time” a young girl, by the name of Jessie, has to leave her village in order to help everyone. She leaves because she has to go get medicine and has to stop her friends from dying. This was her hardship and she chose to deal with it by helping out.

If you had different hardships in your life would you be a different person? The answer is most likely yes. A person’s character is based upon the experiences they have been through. “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant,” –Horace. In “And Still We Rise” by Miles Corwin, Corwin shares the lives of inner city kids who still strive to succeed and go to college although the circumstances they are dealt with have told them otherwise. Some of the kids that dealt with bad hands were Toya, Olivia, and Willie. The struggles that they went through are impetuous.

Many people face challenges and obstacles at a very young age and that can change who they are as they grow up. My grandma faced a very harsh and unfortunate childhood. Her father died when she was 17 and that changed her life and her future. It meant she was given many responsibilities since she was the eldest out of her siblings. She had to do many house chores such as cooking, washing the clothes and dishes and waking up early in the morning to get water from a nearby well every day! This placed a very large obstacle in her life at a very young age. She had to leave school at a very young age because of all the responsibilities she was given and had to overcome these obstacles and face them with great integrity. But due to these obstacles that she has overcome, it has changed who she is now. She struggled in life right from when she was just a little kid. But if she hadn’t overcome these obstacles she wouldn’t have been a very independent woman like she is today. If her father hadn’t died when she was young, she probably would have had a completely different

Life is something that requires a considerable amount of physical and mental effort. Some are fortunate enough to have everything prepared for them. Such as some are born into money; some come across good fortune yet most work hard from the start to get some where in the world. It just all depends on how you were brought into this world. For some people, life is full of stress and hardships. That’s how life was for someone very dear to me. He had it difficult from the start. However he chose not to let life get him down. When life gave him lemons, he made lemonade.