Quotes about life
page 66

“I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Idea, Decision, Change

“Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember "Life is too short to be little".”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Forgetting

“My father had taught me - mostly by example - that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”

Stephen King book Joyland

Source: Joyland

Problem

“There are no random acts… We are all connected… You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind…”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Variant: That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate on life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Context: "All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

“And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Way, Time

“You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Way

“From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”

Ray Bradbury book The Illustrated Man

Source: The Illustrated Man

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Change

“The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself - ultimate cost for perfect value.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Money, Perfection

“If you don’t have a dog--at least one--there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.”

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

Dogs

“This day is going to be awful. It's the sort of day you wouldn't mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.”

Alice Hoffman book Here on Earth

Source: Here on Earth

“My Life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

People, Heart

“When you walk on the beach at night, you can say things you can't say in real life.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Night

“Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Learning

“Everything changes in my life, and the world stays the same.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

World, Change

“Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.”

John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic

Feeling

“You serve a greater cause. Your life is not yours to throw away (Magnus Bane)”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

“We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.”

Gavin Pretor-Pinney (1950) British writer

Source: The Cloudspotter's Guide

Thinking, Fight

“In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.”

Benjamin Zander (1939) English conductor

Source: The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

World, Universe

“There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

So why fret about it?
Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)

Death

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Epigraph
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964)

“Life in us is like the water in a river.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Water

“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

Václav Havel book Letters to Olga

Letters to Olga (1988), p. 237

“If you must know, I-I had never in my life kissed a young lady, and you are far too beautiful to me to want to get it wrong!”

Diana Wynne Jones book Castle in the Air

Source: Castle in the Air

Beauty, Kiss

“Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan

“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Guilty

Laughter, Universe

“Root out the violence in your life, and learn to live compassionately and mindfully. Seek peace. When you have peace within, real peace with others is possible.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Peace, Learning, Peaceful

“As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Something Fresh

Source: Something Fresh

Happiness, People, Pleasure

“Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.”

Thomas Pynchon book Bleeding Edge

Variant: Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen
Source: Bleeding Edge (2013), p. 11

“Plus he was naturally lucky at cards. As Mam had always said, lucky at cards, or lucky at life. One or the other. Not both.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Exiled Queen

Nature

“I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“Corpus Bones! I utterly loathe my life.”

Karen Cushman book Catherine, Called Birdy

Source: Catherine, Called Birdy

“What you need to learn, children, is the difference between right and wrong in every area of life. And once you learn the difference, you must always choose the right.”

Jeanne DuPrau The City of Ember

Source: The City of Ember

Children, Learning

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Daily Telegram #1172, Will Rogers Sees No Value In All The Time We Save (28 April 1930)
Daily telegrams

Time, Funny, Happy

“Some parents let their young kids win at games, but mine never did.

I don't think it was because they were particularly competitive, they just wanted to teach me a valuable lesson.

Life is mostly just learning how to lose.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Saga, Vol. 3

Game, Thinking, Parent, Learning

“Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.”

Nancy Mitford book Christmas Pudding

Source: Christmas Pudding

Dreams

“Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Shadow

Source: Ender's Shadow

“Joel, lad, school is about learning to learn. If you don't practice studying things you don't like, then you'll have a very hard time in life.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Rithmatist

School, Study, Learning, Time

“She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly.”

Ken Follett book The Pillars of the Earth

Source: The Pillars of the Earth

Love

“Life, I've learned, is never fair. If they teach anything in schools, that should be it.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

School, Learning

“I think the most significant work we'll do in our whole life, in our whole world is done within the four walls of our home.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

World, Home, Thinking

“If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

Books, Time, Personality, Speed

“Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful," murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Sadness, Beauty

“Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Change, Past, Future

“They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

Source: The Call of the Wild

“No matter how you spend your life, your wit will defend you more often than a sword. Keep it sharp!”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 40, “On the Horns” (p. 290)
Context: Any student of mine must be able to defend his ideas against an attack. No matter how you spend your life, your wit will defend you more often than a sword. Keep it sharp!

“The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Light, Universe

“You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Source: The Japanese Lover

Happiness, Reality, Waiting

“There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.”

Iain Banks book Look to Windward

Source: Look to Windward

Tear

“The happy man in this life needs friends.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Happiness

“Tap Life on the shoulders and fall a little more in love.”

Rachel Hawthorne (1950) American author

Source: Love on the Lifts

Love

“Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz", in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Variant: Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment — the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

“Life is a constant process of dying.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live.”

Natalie Babbitt (1932–2016) American children's writer and illustrator

Variant: Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.
Source: Tuck Everlasting: Scholastic Book Guides

Death, Fear

“Life is such a miracle, a series of small miracles. It really is, if you learn how to look at it with the right perspective.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Learning

“What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal… and then die.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Books, Learning

“Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Learning

“I don't want this life to end," said Alexander. "The good, the bad, the everything, the very old, to ever end.”

Paullina Simons book The Summer Garden

Source: The Summer Garden

“And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ‘cause now is the time and we all know time!”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Time

“Life isn't a romance novel. The truth is, the reason romance novels sell so well ---- the reason why everyone loves them ---- is because no one's life is actually like that. Everyone WANTS their life to be like that.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Forever Princess

Love, Truth

“In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“My life is not packaged,
Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged
Edges that cut even my friends.”

Walter Dean Myers (1937–2014) American writer

Source: Street Love

“… you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Way, Change, Parting

“Work is the only thing that gives substance to life.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“I knew he would never leave me, never let me down-because the man had never abandoned anything in his long life. If I hadn’t taken the gold rope of our bond, I knew Adam would have sat on me and hog-tied me with it. I liked that. A lot.”

Patricia Briggs book Silver Borne

Source: Silver Borne

“If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: Heart-Shaped Box

“There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for
life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….
If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,
not what pays”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

“sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency”

Bryce Courtenay The Power of One

Source: The Power of One

“Maybe the lesson is: Know when to brag and when to keep your mouth shut. Or: Sometimes life isn’t fair, even if you are as gifted as Athena. Or maybe: Don’t give away free tapestries.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Source: Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

“Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

Sadness

“having
someone think of me that way was like discovering
a new window in the room i'd lived in all my life.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

Way, Thinking

“Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.”

Tom Stoppard The Invention of Love

Source: The Invention of Love

Success

“It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires”

Jean Webster book Daddy-Long-Legs

Source: Daddy-Long-Legs

Courage, Thinking

“Your Life our your lupines!""
Dennis Moore”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

“It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Love, Sadness, Animals

“You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Singing, Painting

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Death

“How beautiful life is and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun

Sadness, Beauty, Past, Future

“I should be doing my homework now. But the way I look at it, playing in the snow is a lot more important. Out here I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life.

- Such as?

- Procrastination and rationalization.”

Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes

Source: Calvin and Hobbes

Way, Learning

“To be good or bad doesn't count: life out in this world doesn't depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You'll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.”

Oriana Fallaci book Letter to a Child Never Born

Source: Letter to a Child Never Born

World, Shoe, Dependency

“The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

As quoted in Know Your Limits — Then Ignore Them (2000) by John Mason, p. 46

Truth

“How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Source: The Professor Of Desire

“…to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Variant: To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.
Source: Skinny Legs and All (1990)

Hell

“When you see a small change in your life it means its a huge change in personality and your trait”

Natasha Friend (1972) American writer

Source: Lush

Change, Personality

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) novelist from Dominica

Source: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“But God fears women even more that He fears the devil- and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Women, God, World, Fear

“I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Drink, Forgetting

“It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare, you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare."
"And what is that nightmare, Craig?"
"Life.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Variant: I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.
Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story