Quotes about life
page 87

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'
What is it then?'
It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Shadow

Source: Ender's Shadow

Way, Suicide, Personality

“Sometimes, love brings you together even as life keeps you apart.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Love

“I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Home, Bird

“Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.”

Mary Stewart book The Hollow Hills

Source: The Hollow Hills

Death, Light

“I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

“The next generation will always surpass the previous one. It's one of the never-ending cycles in life.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

“Then kiss me, Claire," he whispered, "And know that you are more to me than life, and I have no regret.”

Diana Gabaldon book Voyager

Source: Voyager

Kiss

“Sick and disoriented, I'm able to form only one thought: Peeta Mellark just saved my life.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Source: The Deptford Trilogy: Fifth Business/The Manticore/World of Wonders

Star, Support, Thinking

“I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.”

Clive Barker book Imajica

Source: Imajica

Thinking

“Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Back To Work

“Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

“Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.”

Chris Crutcher (1946) American children's writer

Source: Stotan!

Pain, Feeling, Joy

“Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Home, Sleep, Dance

“Life, unfortunately, doesnʹt seem to care what we want. Act now while you can actually stop it from being a disaster.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“Life was short, no matter how many days you were granted. And people were precious, each and every one, no matter how many you were lucky enough to have in your life. And love… love was worth dying for.
Worth living for, too. -Tohrment”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

Love, People

“That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Death, People, Thinking, Dead

“My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

Source: Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Nature, Good Morning

“Sometimes it felt like her life was a series of falls from ever-greater heights.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

“…I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God (1994)

People, Way

“Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Source: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

“Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Source: The October Country

Art

“Do it or don't. It's amazing how many things in life are that easy.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

“I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Variant: I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.
Source: Marilyn

World

“Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.”

Wally Lamb book She's Come Undone

Source: She's Come Undone

“I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Source: Songs My Mother Taught Me

Books, Reading

“No man knows till he experiences it, what it is like to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the woman he loves.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Love, Feeling

“Life doesn't require that we be the best, only that we try our best.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

Light, Hurt

“She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. It's easier to feel the sunlight without them, she said.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Feeling

“What is life without laughter?”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Laughter

“Life with another person is always difficult.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

Personality

“salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

Thinking

“There Are But Two Tragedies in Life-One is One's Inability to attain One's Heart's Desire-The Other Is To Have It!”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Heart

“Stop a minute and listen. I know I'm asking the impossible from you, but for once in your life, shut your mouth and open your ears."

"I'm not the one talking."

Kyrian snarled at him. "Don't get smart with me."

"You want me stupid?"

"Nick….”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Stupidity

“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

Jon Krakauer (1954) American outdoors writer and journalist

Change, Sun, Joy, Positive

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”

George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman

Source: Man and Superman

Heart

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”

Roald Dahl book Matilda

Source: Matilda

People, Reading, Cheating

“Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

History, Dance

“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Feeling

“Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.”

Twyla Tharp (1941) American choreographer

Change, Dead

“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it.”

Brother Lawrence (1614–1691) French Christian monk

God, World

“Isn't life strange? There are people who have so many leftover clothes they can't stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

People, Clothes

“When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Death, Hope

“there are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Source: Girlfriend in a Coma

Cry

“Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Variant: Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Source: A Poetry Handbook

“Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.”

Lee Child book A Wanted Man

Source: A Wanted Man

Guy

“We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Source: On the Road: the Original Scroll

God, Sadness

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

“It'll be hard, but life moves fast-we'll see each other again. I know that. I can feel that. Just like I can feel how much you care for me and how much I love you”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Love, Feeling