“There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker
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Dorothy Parker 172
American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist 1893–1967Related quotes

On his career in the US Coast Guard, as quoted http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/cgcAlexHaley/history.asp at the official site for the Medium Endurance Cutter USCGC Alex Haley http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/cgcAlexHaley/default.asp
Context: You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you … It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.

“Sometimes life, will get you down, break your heart, steal your crown.”
“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
Source: Five Finger Exercise

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
Declaration at his 85th birthday party (6 January 1963), as quoted in The Best of Ralph McGill : Selected Columns (1980) by Ralph McGill, edited by Michael Strickland, Harry Davis, and Jeff Strickland, p. 82
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
As quoted without source in The School Musician Director and Teacher Vol. 43 (1971) by the American School Band Directors' Association