Quotes about living
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“The strangest thing about strange things is that they're only strange when you hear about them or think about them later, but never when you're living them.”

Lori Lansens book The Girls

Source: The Girls

Thinking

“American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

“I want my own books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Variant: .

"I want my books to have their own shelves", you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.
Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Books

“Care for the living. I'll weep for the dead later. - Perrin Aybara”

Robert Jordan The Shadow Rising

Source: The Shadow Rising

Dead

“I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

“Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land, where justice is a game.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Desire (1976), Hurricane

Justice, Feeling, Game, Help

“Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

“Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)
Context: Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Dreams

“What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Life

“Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”

James Hillman (1926–2011) American psychologist

Life, Star, Light

“Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

Love, Dead

“Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

People, Family, Way

“If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Source: Uh-Oh

Life, Time

“The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live.”

James Oliver Curwood book The Grizzly King

Source: The Grizzly King

“Far too many people opened their hearts and lives at the drop of a hat. Why give someone that power over you? Why endow them with the ability to hurt you that much? Let someone in and you were asking for an emotional kicking some day.”

Dorothy Koomson book My Best Friend's Girl

Source: My Best Friend's Girl

People, Heart, Hurt

“We are not Human Beings experiencing spiritual lives, we are spiritual beings experiencing human lives.”

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

“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Books, Star, Universe

“What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

“The way I see it, living in New Jersey is a challenge, what with the toxic waste and the eighteen wheelers and the armed schizophrenics."
Connie Rosolli”

Janet Evanovich book One for the Money

Source: One for the Money

Way

“No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Kitchen

Source: Kitchen

“I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

Life, Knowledge, Waiting

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)

People

“My ambition was to live like music.”

Mary Gaitskill (1954) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Music

“If some lives form a perfect circle, other take shape in ways we cannot predict or always understand. Loss has been part of my journey. But it has also shown me what is precious. So has love for which I can only be grateful.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Love, Way, Understanding, Loss

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Faith, Personality

“What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”

Justin Cronin The Passage

Dr. Jonas Lear
Variant: I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to. What dark passages.
Source: The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Like Life

“There's nothing I can't live with. Only things I won't live without.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

“Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves.”

Christopher Moore book A Dirty Job

Source: A Dirty Job

World

“When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Color

“Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you've ever heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn't win.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Love, Girl, Boy

“But its not funny. Not to people who've been told they're losers their whole lives and believe they will never be anything else.”

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

People

“Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

“Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.”

Meg Rosoff (1956) American-British children's writer

Source: There Is No Dog

Life, Stupidity, Way, Thinking

“Tania, last time in Morozovo, I let you go, but not this time. This time we live together or we die together.”

Paullina Simons book Tatiana and Alexander

Source: Tatiana and Alexander

Time

“I offered them Utopia, but they fought for the right to live in Hell.”

Mark Millar book Superman: Red Son

Source: Superman: Red Son

Hell

“Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and freedom as you can.”

Sarah Kane (1971–1999) playwright from England

Life, Freedom

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Source: Night Film

Love, Fear

“And if, in some distant place in the future, we see each other in our new lives, I will smile at you with joy, and remember how we spent a summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Love, Smile, Tree, Learning

“Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.”

David Sedaris When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Source: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

World, Time

“The roles we play in each other's lives are only as powerful as the trust and connection between us--the protection, safety, and caring we are willing to share.”

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

“To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard”

Francis Fukuyama (1952) American political scientist, political economist, and author

Feeling

“Though we may not be able to see His purpose or His plan, the Lord of heaven is on His throne and in firm control of the universe and our lives.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: America Looks Up: Reaching Toward Heaven for Hope and Healing

Universe

“We had to save you because you're the mockingjay, Katniss," says Plutarch. "While you live, the revolution lives.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.”

Anna Funder book All That I Am

Source: All That I Am

Love

“Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

People, Past, Future

“To live your best life now, you must learn to trust God’s timing, you may not think He’s working, but you can be sure that right now, behind the scenes, God is arranging all the pieces to come together to work out His plan for your life.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Life, God, Thinking, Learning

“No," mom says, looking at me in the eyes. "What's a triumph is that you woke up this morning and decided to LIVE. THAT'S a triumph. that's what you did today.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Moms

“We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

Memory

“Someday you're really going to have to describe to me in more detail what life is like on the planet you live on. Because it sounds really great, and I'd like to visit there one day.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Queen of Babble in the Big City

Life

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) Japanese-born British author

Speed

“A child embarrassed by his mother,” she said, “is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so… I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her.”

Laurie Halse Anderson book Chains

Source: Chains

Soul, Hurt

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Life, World, Time

“I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Color, Memory, Past

“Unfinished Poem
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Love

“We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds.”

Eqbal Ahmad (1933–1999) writer, journalist, anti-war activist

Source: Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire

World, Time

“Conservatives want live babies so they can train them to be dead soldiers.”

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

Baby, Training, Dead

“Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?”

Erich Segal book The Class

Source: The Class

Life, Youth

“There are generations yet unborn,
whose very lives will be shifted and shaped by the moves you make and the actions you take.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

“Do you live each day as if it's your first or your last? Either way you should probably have a diaper on.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Way

“Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they’re killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? 'Sweetheart, let’s make up. Have this deceased squirrel.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

People, Flowers

“The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mould”

Oswald Chambers book My Utmost for His Highest

Source: My Utmost for His Highest

People, Star

“People who stay in the same town with the same friends for their entire lives never get a chance to find out who they can really be, because they will always be considered as who they were.”

Lisa Unger book Fragile

Source: Fragile

People, Chance

“She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you would never know.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Hope, Game, Time, Hurt

“But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

Life, People, Thinking, Waiting

“Eerily, the coronation was kind of a reverse of Tatianaʹs funeral. What was the old saying? The queen is dead. Long live the queen”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Dead

“It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Moving On

“Even if lives did hang in the balance, it would depend on whose they were.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Dependency

“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 193
Context: For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.

People, Star, Universe

“When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

God

“Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Economy and Pleasure".
What Are People For? (1990)

Justice, Law

“Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Happiness, People, Search, Hurt

“You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

People

“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Evil

“Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

"New York at 6:30 P.M.", Esquire (November 1964)
Context: There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

Night

“I'd been willing to kill for the people I loved for a very long time; now I had to start living for them.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Love, People, Time