Quotes about living

page 31

“But then, is there cowardice in the acknowledgment of fear? Is there cowardice in being glad that you lived?”

“After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.”

“I miss her. I don't know how to live without her. There is a hole inside me that nothing fills.
If you don't find something to fill that hole, someone else will. And if someone else fills it, they own you. Forever. You'll never get yourself back.”

“I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.”

“O great creator of being
grant us one more hour to
perform our art
and perfect our lives”

“After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.”

“my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.”

“The upshot of her tirade was that I was the devil's spawn and should be locked up in a tower before I unleashed hordes of the living dead to slaughter them all in their sleep. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much.”

“I live by syllogisms: God is love. Love is blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God. I don't know what I'd believe in if it wasn't for that.”

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.”

“I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be — that proves I love him better than myself.”

“Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”

“Life is only lived full-time by women with children.”

“A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken”

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”

“How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.”

“Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.”

“You've lived in America for twenty years. Eat badly, damn it.”

“What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”

“I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.”

“Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.”

“This is fusion, when two people become one. They are so close and so well suited to each other that they blend together. They merge and can't live without each other after that.”

“July 24, 6:03 A. M.
The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff…
Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing.
He killed himself for wanting to live.”

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

“That is our Fairy Tail!! We don't live like we have already died, like you do!! We live with our lives on the lines, you bastard!! If you don't have the courage to change things then you might as well just die!!!”

“It's a good thing I've got to live with you two or I'd be putting this on YouTube later. And mocking you”

“Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.”

“You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”

“That drew a mocking laugh from Lillian. “Really, someone should tell St. Vincent that he’s a living cliché. He has become the embodiment of everything they say about reformed rakes.”

“Live now. When you are eating, eat. When you are loving, love. when you are talking with someone, talk. When you are looking at a flower, look. Catch the beauty of the moment!”

“Fate is fickle, and the company of unwilling friends short lived.”

“Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of.”

“all my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.”

“Live your life, take chances, be crazy. Dont wait 'cause right now is the oldest you've ever been & the youngest you'll be ever again”

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”

“I live in the present because the future is always chancy. When it comes to being with you, I'm willing to take the risk.”

“… So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”

“Here had lived someone else who knew that the only thing waiting at home was a sense of loneliness.

Sometimes it is comforting.

Most often, it isn't.”

“Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.”

“What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart?
It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.”

“It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

“They say The Pacific has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”

“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.”

“What the matter, Zarek? You afraid to die? (Thanatos)
Dying’s easy. It’s living that’s hard. (Zarek)”

“During our lives… we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope.”

“There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.”

“A man with nothing to die for has even less for which to live.”

“We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.”

“I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.”

“The masses-I love em-they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.”

“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people, we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

“And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.”

“Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.”

“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”

“The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about ‘what is true for me’ is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.”

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.”

“Unequal lives give rise to unequal dreams.”

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.”

“Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.”

“Surely there can't be so many countries worth dying for.'
Anything worth living for,' said Nately, 'is worth dying for.'
And anything worth dying for,' answered the sacrilegious old man, 'is certainly worth living for.”

“Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen,
who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat,
who never lived and yet outlived her time,
hating men and dogs and Democrats.”

“He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.”

“For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”

“How am I going to live today to create the tomorrow I've committed to?”

“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”

“It's a lot easier to be crazy or mad than to just get on with living.”

“… I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.”

“She was so fed up with unrequited love and platonic love and all the other kinds of love that weren’t passionate, romantic, can’t-live-without-you, I-have-to-have-you-right-now, the-beat-of-your-heart-matches-the-beat-of-mine love.”

“The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.”

“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.”

“Shri Ramakrishna use to say, "As Long as I Live, so long do I learn". That man or that society which has nothing to learn is already in the jaws of death.”

“He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.”

“I never did learn how to live in the moment, but I did learn that moments could be wasted and the world would continue to spin on its axis.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..”

“Secret Notes:
He wrote secret notes to people he hadn't met yet. Some of them aren't even born, he said, but we live in a strange neighborhood & they will need help figuring things out & I won't always be around to explain it to them.”

“Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.”

“Why on earth would you buy a car like this if you can't drive a stick? There are dozens of cars--new cars--that have automatic transmission. It'd be a million times easier."
Adrian shrugged. "I like the color. It matches my living room.”

“Every once in a while you just have to decide to do something very crazy and very right--just to dare yourself to live. I don't mean doing something stupid and destructive--just something fun and good and beautiful.”

“Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?”

“I'd rather die while I'm living than live while I'm dead.”

“I fell in love with her for her sense of humour. If she ever lost her sense of humour, I would have to dump her. Then I'd kill myself because I couldn't live without her.”

“Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?”

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”

“You can fool some of the people some of the time -- and that's enough to make a decent living.”

“The future is always changing. If we had no choices, there'd be no point in living.”

“Hebrew word for "charity" tzedakah, simply means "justice" and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.”

“Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.”

“No matter where we live on the planet or how difficult our situation seems to be, we have the ability to overcome and transcend our circumstances.”

“Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.”

“A hero is someone who simply got too frightened to use his good sense and run away, then somehow lived through it all.”

“I live my life you live yours. If you're clear about what u want then you can live anyway you please. I don't give a damn what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care.”

“In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.”

“Maybe we shouldn't be living this way, without grass and trees, and ducks, always under pressure, always trying to catch up, never enough time or energy for the things we love, if we can even remember what those things are.”