Quotes about life
page 59

“War and hunting and chasing-that's all there is. That's life, Jenny-no one can escape it.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Chase

“They called each other family and that’s what they were—sisters. Many people in the world had family of the heart, kin by choice rather than by blood, and hers had come along in her darkest hour and saved her life.”

Christine Feehan American writer

Source: Spirit Bound

People, World, Family, Sister

“The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

World, Way, Understanding

“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence

Source: The Enchantress of Florence

Travel

“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.”

Julia Cameron book The Artist's Way

Variant: Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness.
Source: The Artist's Way (1992)
Context: Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

“Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Love

“Learning

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Learning

“There aren’t many sure things in life, but one thing I know for sure is
that you have to deal with the consequences of your actions. You have to follow
through on some things.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Variant: There aren’t many sure things in life, but one thing I do know is that you have to deal with the consequences of your actions. You have to follow through on some things.
Source: Love, Rosie

“Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?”

Erich Segal book The Class

Source: The Class

Youth

“I’d had a key to the marina’s locks at one time, but I’d lost track of it when I got shot, drowned, died, got revived into a coma, haunted my friends for a while, and then woke up in Mab’s bed.

(My life. Hell’s bells.)”

Jim Butcher book Cold Days

Source: Cold Days

Hell, Time

“Life is about learning; when you stop learning, you die.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

As quoted in The Appraiser's Handbook : A Guide for Doctors (2007) by Nick Lyons, Susanne Caesar, Abayomi McEwen, p. 11.

Learning

“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.”

Isabel Allende book Paula

Source: Paula

Death, Silence

“No stories or explanations,' Finnikin had once told him. 'When it comes to women, straight into an apology and you will find the rest of your life bearable.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Froi of the Exiles

Women

“Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and *look* for trouble.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Death

“By the time I finish with the two of you, you will be begging me to let you die. (Desiderius)
Desi dearest, I have never begged a day in my life, and the sun will surely splinter before I ever plead for anything from the likes of you. (Kyrian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Night Pleasures

Source: Night Pleasures

Time, Sun

“A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.”

Lois Wyse (1926–2007) American advertising executive

World, Past, Future, Friendship

“We are each the love of someone's life.”

Andrew Sean Greer book The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Source: The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Love

“If my luck held, it wouldn't be a handsome Greek demigod looking for the love of his life or at least his love of a couple of hours.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Love

“We just had a near-life experience!”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Variant: We just had a near-life experience
Source: Fight Club

“I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

Love, Death, Way, Dead

“It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.”

Jennifer Haigh (1968) Novelist

Source: The Condition

Friendship, People, Learning, Loyalty

“Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Mountain, Despair

“After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.”

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

“That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

People, Thinking, Waiting

“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Source: The Clowns of God (1981), Ch. II (ellipses in original) 
This statement begins with a quotation from Horace, Odes, Book I, Ode ix, line 13.
Context: "Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.

Waiting

“later down the road of life, i made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land.”

Jimmy Buffett book A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Source: A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Water

“Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"The Black Cottage" (1914)
1910s

Truth, Thinking, Change

“Where there is life, there is hope.”

Alyson Nöel (1965) writer

Source: Everlasting

Hope

“Maybe that's what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Letter to Alan Harrington (23 April 1949) published in Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956 (1996)
Source: Selected Letters, 1940-1956

Star, Motivational, Wise, Deep

“But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope),…”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hope

“I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”

Meg Rosoff book How I Live Now

Source: How I Live Now

“The great object of life is sensation- to feel that we exist, even though in pain.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Pain, Feeling

“Very early in my life it was already too late.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness…”

Anne Rivers Siddons (1936–2019) novelist from the United States

Source: Colony

Beauty, Sea

“Life's a show and we all play a part
And when the music starts
We open up our hearts”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Music, Heart, Parting

“I was the life and she was the soul of every party.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Gift

Soul

“For the first time I realize how perilous peace can be. I appreciate the tightrope that my grandfather has spent his whole life trying to walk. And now, more than ever, I grow terrified that I'm going to make us all fall down.”

Ally Carter book All Fall Down

Source: All Fall Down

Peace, Time

“Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Hope, Feeling

“They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Love, Lie, Lovers, Parting

“People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Source: Night Film

People, Change

“If only it were so easy to pick up the broken pieces of life, glue them back together, and cover them with paint like nothing had ever happened.”

Patti Callahan Henry American writer

Source: Between The Tides

Painting

“All men are created equal. It is what you do from there that makes the difference. We are all free agents in life. We make our own decisions. We control our own destiny.”

Glenn Beck book An Inconvenient Book

The Income Gap: The Rich Get Richer, Good for Them
An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems
2007-11-20
Threshold Editions
1416560440
83
2000s

Men, Decision

“Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

Personality

“Life is stronger than death.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Death

“The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Thinking

“I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.”

Knut Hamsun book Mysteries

Source: Mysteries

Death, Peace

“Life, unfortunately, doesn't seem to care what we want.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Perfection

“Bad things happen to good people all the time. It sucks. It's not fair but then much of life isn't fair. It's how you live that matters. It's how you deal with the bumps in the road.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Echoes at Dawn

People, Time

“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”

Atul Gawande book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Source: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Death

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”

Guy De Maupassant book Suicides

"Suicides"

World, Universe, Memory, Perfection

“Love makes life a little brighter”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

Love

“Yes, life was very sweet and cosy with Scarlett - as long as she had her own way”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Way

“Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair..”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Source: Fool

Despair

“I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Money, Children

“Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Understanding

“Man, life was complicated. But the truth was simple. He was her home. He was where she belonged.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

Truth, Home

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.”

Primo Levi book If This Is a Man

If This Is a Man (1947)
Context: Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition, which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.

Happiness, Perfection

“Everyone tried with me. And everytime, it felt like the whole point of life was to see if trying was ever enough.”

David Levithan book Every You, Every Me

Source: Every You, Every Me

“The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life… He played that which he would never play again.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Soul

“But what is life if you don't live it?”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Hurtful, Anniversary

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Way

“Life was mostly made up of things you couldn’t control, full of surprises, and they weren’t always good. Life wasn’t what you made it. You were what life made you.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: Sweethearts

“Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Death

“Knowing who you really are and dressing the part -- with an air of amused recklessness -- is life affirming for you and life enhancing for other people.”

Simon Doonan (1952) British businessman

Source: Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You

People, Parting

“My mind struggled to formulate a coherent though, any thought. I opened my mouth. "Your pajamas have Eeyore on them."

"I like Eeyore. He's sensible. A sober outlook on life never hurt anyone.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Gunmetal Magic

Hurt

“I took the life of the woman I was supposed to call mother in the process of being born… in order to become the world's strongest shinobi… an incarnation of sand was implanted inside of me…”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

World

“My heart shatters. My world shatters.

you will lose what you value most.

It wasn't my life or even Dimitri's life.

what you value most

It was his soul.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Variant: You will lose what you value most...

It hadn't been me that Rhonda was talking about. It hadn't even been Dimitri's life.

What you value most.

It had been his soul.
Source: Spirit Bound

World, Soul, Heart

“It's my motto for life. 'Walk slowly; drink lots of water.”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

Drink, Water

“Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto: A Novel

World

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

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

As quoted in his obituary in The Guardian (28 December 1977)

“What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of
attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Learning

“Life begins at night”

Charlaine Harris book Dead Until Dark

Source: Dead Until Dark

Night

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Helen to Milicent

Truth, Youth, World, Idea

“(to Foaly) Captain Short's life is in danger, so push the button before I climb that tower and push it with your face!”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Source: Artemis Fowl

“Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: The Alphabet of Grace (1970)

Forgiveness, Sleep, Night

“My joy grows with every soul that seeks the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Remember, you have one life. That’s all. You were made for
God. Don’t waste it.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

God, Soul, Joy, Christ

“Sometimes, you didn’t get what you wanted. But if you had all you needed? Life was good.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: The King

“I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.”

William Boyd book Any Human Heart

Source: Any Human Heart

“It's always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph (2011)
Context: It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility. You can try to stop time, but it’s a complete waste of energy.

World, Failure, Success