“We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.”

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

“He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.”

Jennifer Donnelly (1963) American writer

“How we live our lives does not, unfortunately depend on us alone. Circumstances, good or bad, constantly intervene. A person close to us die. A person not so close to us carries on living. All these things affect how we live.”

Tariq Ali (1943) British Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian

“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

“It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

“It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse—
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.”

Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972) English poet

“I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”

Henry David Thoreau book Civil Disobedience

“Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer