Quotes about living
page 42

“Life is a succesion of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

“We live in a primitive time—don’t we, Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.”

Thomas Harris Red Dragon

Source: Red Dragon

Books, Time

“The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Life, School

“if we focus on what's ugly, we attract more ugliness into our thoughts, and then into our emotions, and ultimately into our lives”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Source: The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way

“You have made him live.”

Jude Morgan

Indiscretion

“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

Youth, Imagination, Future

“we are all supposed to think of reasons to live.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Thinking

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

Thornton Wilder Our Town

Source: Our Town

Life

“What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Madness, Dead

“I can’t… I find that I can’t concentrate. On anything. I can’t really…” Rhage’s eyes drifted to Zsadist. “How do you live with it? All the anger. The pain. The…”

Jessica Bird book Lover Eternal

Source: Lover Eternal

Pain, Anger

“Step by step
Moment by moment
We live through
Another day”

Anne McCaffrey book Dragon Harper

Source: Dragon Harper

“Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part… and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Parting

“A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.”

Dean Koontz book The Husband

Source: The Husband

Life, Death, People, Birth

“I hated every minute of it. But I said to myself, 'Suffer now, and live the rest of your life as a champion.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

On training, as quoted in "Ali: Born Again!" by Pete Axthelm and Peter Bonventre, Newsweek (25 September 1978)

Life, Hate, Suffering

“the beautiful are found in the edge of a room
crumpled into spiders and needles and silence
and we can never understand why they
left, they were so
beautiful.

they dont make it,
the beautiful die young
and leave the ugly to their ugly lives.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Beauty, Understanding, Silence

“His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief… Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Source: Golden Fool

Knowledge, Loss, Parting

“If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

“May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Love, Anniversary

“You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.”

Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Life, Understanding

“Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Life

“i usedta live in the world
really be in the world
free & sweet talkin
good mornin & thank-you & nice day
uh huh
i cant now
i cant be nice to nobody
nice is such a rip-off
regular beauty & a smile in the street
is just a set-up”

Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Source: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

World, Smile, Beauty

“Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)”

Julia Cameron (1948) American writer

Source: God is No Laughing Matter

“As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Source: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Men

“We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) American novelist

Source: Cross Creek

Men, Heart

“Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

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

Happiness, Hope, Decision, Time

“I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.”

Khaled Hosseini (1965) novelist

Time

“It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different--men and women live in different worlds… at core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

Gavin de Becker (1954) American engineer

Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Women, Men, World, Understanding

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

God, Girl, Decision

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Death, Evil, Dead

“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Diary entry of Friday (2 February)
Source: Nausea (1938)

People, Learning, Appearance

“Honestly, what planet do these people live on? And why isn't it farther away?”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: On the Bright Side, I'm Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God

People

“The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.”

Tess Gerritsen book The Sinner

Source: The Sinner

Hurt, Dead

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Drink, Season, Beauty, Peaceful

“He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.”

Tracy Chevalier (1962) American writer

Source: Girl With A Pearl Earring

Life, Beauty, Way, Light

“Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognized, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved.”

Dean Koontz book The Darkest Evening of the Year

Source: The Darkest Evening of the Year

Love, People, Loneliness

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Source: Giovanni's Room

Love, Death, Time

“Our lives are marked and shaped by our regrets. Things we all want to take back and can’t. In a perfect world, we would never hurt the ones we love or cause hurt to befall them. But the world isn’t perfect and neither are we.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

Love, World, Hurt, Perfection

“The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.”

John Wyndham book The Chrysalids

Source: The Chrysalids

Life, Change, Parting

“All little creatures are beautiful… every living thing when it first sees life is born in beauty. What they grow to be is a different matter.”

Brian Jacques book Outcast of Redwall

Source: Outcast of Redwall

Life, Beauty

“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

Source: The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

Life, Hope

“breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Dreams, Drink, Sleep

“The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Source: Enchantment

Beauty, Fools, Sleep

“It's strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

Hope, Way, Thinking, Decision

“The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak to them we touch their heart and become a part of thier life force.”

Isabel Allende book The Stories of Eva Luna

Source: The Stories of Eva Luna

Life, Heart, Parting, Personality

“The life of the individual has meaning only insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.”

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

Life, Beauty

“God help us to live slowly:
To move simply:
To look softly:
To allow emptiness:
To let the heart create for us.
Amen.”

Michael Leunig (1945) Australian artist

God, Help, Heart

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

Marshall McLuhan book War and Peace in the Global Village

Source: War and Peace in the Global Village

Fish, Water

“It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”

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

From a letter to Hermann Huth, Vice-President of the German Vegetarian Federation, 27 December 1930. Supposedly published in German magazine Vegetarische Warte, which existed from 1882 to 1935. Einstein Archive 46-756. Quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2011), [//books.google.it/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&pg=PA453 p. 453].
1930s
Context: Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.

“She was the one who was supposed to have walked with him through different lives, being born and loving and dying and being born again. They'd been born for each other, to help each other grow and blossom and discover and evolve.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 2

Love, Help

“I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Time

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Love, Fear, Wise, Deep

“So I left my wonderfully intelligent family and soaked myself in the bath and considered drowning myself. Then I remembered I still had chocolate cake left over from yesterday so I came back up for air. Some things are worth living for.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Source: Love, Rosie

Family, Intelligence

“You live in my head all the time." (Clary Fray)”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Time

“Who the hell would attack the Steel Horse anyway? What was the thinking behind that? “Here is a bar full of psychotic killers who grow giant claws and people who pilot the undead for a living. I think I’ll go wreck the place.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

People, Hell, Thinking, Horse

“Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Life, People, Beauty

“You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here… Death ends life, not a relationship.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Life, Death, Heart

“Because in the end, and no matter how hard it is, acceptance helps people move on with the rest of their lives.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

People, Help

“Just like any woman,… we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Children, Art

“This is the one and only
firmament; therefore
it is the absolute world.
There is no other world.
The circle is complete.
I am living in Eternity.
The ways of this world
are the ways of Heaven.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

World, Way

“Butch didn't live in his own place. He didn't spend his own money. He had no job, no future. He was a well-kept pet, not a man.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Revealed

Source: Lover Revealed

Money, Future

“When you live life with him or without him, that is when he will accept and value you for who you are.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Life

“Live as though life was created for you.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Life

“I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of living.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

Way, History

“The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Life, Heart

“The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Men, God, Communication, Question

“We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

“That proves you are unusual," returned the Scarecrow; "and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

People, World, Tree

“Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”

Cal Newport (1982) American computer scientist

Source: So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Passion

“Life is made of our attitudes. And there are certain things that the gods oblige us to live through. Their reason for this does not matter, and there is no action we can take to make them pass us by.”

Paulo Coelho book The Fifth Mountain

Source: The Fifth Mountain

Life, God

“To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Death, Feeling

“In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Life, Imagination, Literature, Revenge

“How is it they live in such harmony, the billions of stars, when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds?”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Men, War, Star

“Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Reading Life

Life, Books, Change, Reading

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.”

Jodi Picoult book The Pact

Variant: The gun slipped on Emily's temple, and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.
Source: The Pact

Pain, Heart

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

People, Books, World

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Life, Fear, Anger

“I wonder what it's like to live in Tinaville. I get the feeling it's very shiny there.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Forever Princess

Feeling

“I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Source: The Simple Art of Murder

Pleasure, Art, Mathematics, Reading

“Living is messy.”

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

“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

Life

“We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Reading

“A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Context: A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

Thinking

“It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light

Source: A Ring of Endless Light

Love, World

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 153
Source: Suttree (1979)

Death, Memory, Dead

“We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Happiness

“You live you die and death not ends it.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: We live, we die
and death not ends it
Context: O great creator of being
grant us one more hour to
perform our art
and perfect our lives The moths & atheists are doubly divine
& dying
We live, we die
and death not ends it

Death

“Many… have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Life, Learning

“I'm sorry, Gemma. But we can't live in the light all of the time. You have to take whatever light you can hold into the dark with you.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Light, Time

“I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”

Henry David Thoreau book Life Without Principle

Life Without Principle (1863)
Context: I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

Life, Time, Parting

“At this moment, many people have stopped living. They do not become angry, nor cry out; they merely wait for time to pass. They did not accept the challenges of life, so life no longer challenges them”

Paulo Coelho book The Fifth Mountain

Source: The Fifth Mountain

Life, People, Time, Waiting

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

Love, Youth, Failure, Memory