Quotes about life
page 91

“I am not sure I trust you."
"You can trust me with your life, My King."
"But not with my wine, obviously. Give it back.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Wine

“Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2002), Ch. 2 : I'm Not an Accident
Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

God, Hope

“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”

Orson Scott Card book Shadow of the Giant

Source: Shadow of the Giant

Love, People

“I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over any lips, my hands!”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

“So I saved your life, and you repaid me by raising Kronos. That's fair.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

“We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Way, Light, Time

“Just do something. You might make a mistake, then you can fix it. But if you do nothing, you can't fix anything. And your life might turn out full of regrets.”

Jenny Colgan (1972) British writer

Source: The Little Shop of Happy Ever After

“In order for one to learn the important lessons of life, one must first overcome a fear each day.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Fear, Learning

“But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Justice, Law, Time

“This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Hope, Personality

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.”

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

As quoted by Ernst Straus in Einstein: A Centenary Volume by A.P. French (1980), p. 32. <br class="br">Attributed in posthumous publications <br class="br">Variant: "if you want to be a happy man, you should tie your life to a goal, not to other people and not to things." A quote from Ernst Straus' memoir of Einstein in Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives edited by Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (1982), p. 420 http://books.google.com/books?id=CNuwE3NL1QgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA420#v=onepage&q&f=false

Happiness, People, Motivational

“You should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Books

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Journal entry (November 1951) as published in the Kerouac ROMnibus http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/resguide/resources/j100.html

Hope

“Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.”

James Frey book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Death

“An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Variants (Many of MLKs' speeches were delivered many times with slight variants): An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'
As quoted in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King, Second Edition (2011), Ch. "Community of Man", p. 3
1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

People, Problem, Personality

“If we can't respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Money, Family, Way

“A mother's hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.”

Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978) writer and poet

Forgiveness, Understanding

“A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Death, Tree

“In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Mountain

“In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Soul, Imagination

“At moments when life is at its worst there are two things you can do:
1.) break down, lose hope and refuse to go on while lying face down on the ground banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2.) laugh. Bobby and I did the latter.”

Cecelia Ahern book A Place Called Here

Variant: At moments when life is at its worst there are two things that you can
do: 1) break down, lose hope, and refuse to go on while lying facedown on the ground
banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2) laugh.
Source: A Place Called Here

Hope, Lying

“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”

Stephen King book It

Page 1087
Source: It (1986)
Context: Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question...So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away...drive away from Derry, from memory...but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.
Context: So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe New England skyline one final time... Best not to look back. Best to believe that there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question... So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away... drive away from Derry, from memory... but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.

Smile, Courage, Hope

“We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Source: Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology

People, Communication

“Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

God, Art

“I will tell you that there have been no failures in my life. I don't want to sound like some metaphysical queen, but there have been no failures. There have been some tremendous lessons.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Failure

“The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

Way

“His life has been like a ballpark, hasn't it? All lines, structure, and rules, never changing. But now he's been hit over the wall into unknown territory.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Change

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Tous les changements, même les plus souhaités ont leur mélancolie, car ce que nous quittons, c'est une partie de nous-mêmes; il faut mourir à une vie pour entrer dans une autre.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

Change, Parting, Goodbye

“truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.”

Naomi Novik book Uprooted

Source: Uprooted

Truth

“Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

Source: The Crossing

Memory, Sad, Deep, Family

“I tasted life.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“But sooner or later, no matter who you are, life uses everyone as its whipping boy.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Silence

Boy

“Every woman should have four pets in her life. A mink in her closet, a jaguar in her garage, a tiger in her bed, and a jackass who pays for everything.”

Paris Hilton (1981) American socialite

Variant: Every woman should have four pets in her life. A mink in her closet, a jaguar in her garage, a tiger in her bed, and a jackass who pays for everything.

“Life isn't fair," Owen told her. "Get used to it.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

“I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better….”

Chris Bohjalian (1962) American novelist

Source: Secrets of Eden

“But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

God, Way, Passion, Christ

“The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Source: Journals, 1889-1949

Truth

“Life is tough, then you die.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise (1984)

Sadness, Sense, Animals

“It is an occupational hazard that anyone who has spent her life learning how to lie eventually becomes bad at telling the truth.”

Ally Carter book Heist Society

Source: Heist Society

Truth, Lie, Learning

“The complete bottom has fallen out of my life.”

Beatrice Sparks (1917–2012) American writer

Source: Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, A Pregnant Teenager

“I don't want to live the rest of my life thinking about you and dreaming of what might have been. Stay with me, Allie.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Dreams, Thinking

“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”

Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

People

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

"The Love of Long Ago"
Source: The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant
Context: There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

Love, Good Night

“Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave.”

Terry Goodkind (1948) American novelist

Communication, Personality

“Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Red Bird

Business, Heart

“My mother told me that life isn't always about pleasing yourself and that sometimes you have to do things for the sole benefit of another human being. I completely agreed with her, but reminded her that that was what blow jobs were for.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

Source: My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“It's a scary thing; moving on. Part of me wishes life were more predictable and part of me is excited that it's not. I think it's impossible to tell the good things from the bad things while they're happening.”

Chris Crutcher book Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Source: Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Thinking, Parting

“You are educated. Your
certification is in your
degree. You may think of
it as the ticket to the good
life. Let me ask you to think of an
alternative. Think of it as your
ticket to change the world.”

Tom Brokaw (1940) Television journalist

World, Education, Thinking, Change

“As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Error

“The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

Lila (1991)

“You don’t live life. You act it.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Ain't She Sweet

“I can’t undo the past. But in the future, I will gladly lay my life down for you, brother. (Styxx)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Second Chances

Past, Future

“There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life'.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“Nothing is really lost or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing…
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers
left from early fires,
… shall duly flame again”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Age, World, Birth

“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss and Peeta (p. 388; closing words of the main text)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
So after, when he whispers, "You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real."

Spring, Loss

“Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.”

Aimee Bender (1969) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

People, Parent, Strong

“Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Secret, Books, Beauty

“I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: On his appointment as Prime Minister, May 10, 1940; The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948).

Past

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making
trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Source: Pygmalion & My Fair Lady

World, Way

“You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: A is for Alibi

“Life is nothing if you're not obsessed.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

“My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

Hope, Way, Reality

“Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.”

Suzanne Weyn book Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Source: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

“Sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

People

“Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.”

Henry Miller book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Source: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Way

“Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Speaking Of Love (1980)

Love, Wedding, For Him

“…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me…”

"I’ve never much cared for horror stories.”

Anthony Horowitz Alex Rider

Source: Snakehead

Books

“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

“A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones.”

Anita Shreve (1946–2018) American writer

Source: Eden Close

Personality

“Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Way

“Rarely do we invest the time to open the book of another's life. When we do, we are usually surprised to find its cover so misleading and its reviews so flawed.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Books, Time

“How do I explain a life that has lasted for billions of years? It is almost as if I must start with an apology for being alive when everyone I once knew is dead.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: The Starlight Crystal

Dead

“Life is like a hot bath. It feels good while you're in it, but the longer you stay, the more wrinkled you get.”

Jim Davis (1945) American cartoonist and creator of Garfield

Feeling

“A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Death, Dead

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Way

“But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.”

Nicholson Baker book The Anthologist

Source: The Anthologist

Death, Thinking

“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Feeling

“So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.”

Justin Cronin The Passage

Source: The Passage

“Not enough," he said, letting her hair slip through his fingers. "If I kiss you all day, everyday, for the rest of my life, it won't be enough.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Kiss

“The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.”

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

Star

“Life is long. Just because you don't get your chance right when you want or expect it doesn't mean it won't come. Fate doesn't punch a time clock or consult a schedule.”

Sarah Dessen book The Moon and More

Source: The Moon and More

Fate, Chance, Time

“When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Thinking

“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.”

Thomas Pynchon (1937) American novelist

Source: Slow Learner: Early Stories

Thinking

“The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“I've lived my life again just telling it to you.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

“Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 7: Time
Context: Sometimes you're invited to a big ball and for months you think about how glamorous and exciting it's going to be. Then you fly to Europe and you go to the ball and when you think back on it a couple of months later what you remember is maybe the car ride to the ball, you can't remember the ball at all. Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. I should have been dreaming for months about the car ride to the ball and getting dressed for the car ride, and buying my ticket to Europe so I could take the car ride. Then, who knows, maybe I could have remembered the ball.

Thinking, Time

“You must become the producer, director and actor in the unfolding story of your life.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.”

Laura Hillenbrand book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Source: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Food, Soul, Water, Past