Quotes about life
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“You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.”

Source: Choke

“What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.”

George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion

Act II
Source: 1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

Chance

“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

Anaïs Nin book Incest: From a Journal of Love

July 7, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Variant: Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Source: Incest: From a Journal of Love
Context: I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Way

“Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Books

“The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

People, World, Soul, Spring

“Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry. I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

O Taste and See : New Poems (1964), The Secret
Source: Poems, 1960-1967

Secret, Girl

“Before this trip and all that she'd learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

Source: Winter Garden

Pain, Learning, Change

“Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Variant: Life is more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.

“Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.”

Stephen Fry book Making History

Source: Making History

Love, Study

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said. “And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave.”

Stephen King book Revival

Source: Revival

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion… Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Money, People, Way, Thinking

“Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

Brendan Gill (1914–1997) American journalist

Idea

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Courage, Courageous

“You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.”

Orson Scott Card The Worthing Chronicle

Source: The Worthing Chronicle

“Hannah: Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

To the barber, while being shaved by him.
The Great Dictator (1940)

People

“It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Death, Family, Dreams, Housing

“These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Quincy Adams (19 January 1780)
Context: These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Context: These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Time