Quotes about living
page 43

“If I can live through this, he thought, I can live through anything. If I can live through this, I WILL live through anything.”

Paullina Simons book Tatiana and Alexander

Source: Tatiana and Alexander

“Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

People, Dreams, Suffering

“Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Love, Business, Thinking, Time

“If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”

Christopher Isherwood book A Single Man

Source: A Single Man

World, Time

“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

Happiness, Time

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

World, Dreams

“The dead are way more organized than the living.”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun

Way, Dead

“We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Cheating at Solitaire

Love, Thinking

“Prancing around with marshmallowss on your nipples does *not* constitute living your life fully!”

Lauren Myracle (1969) American children's writer

Life

“Those are shrines. Some people believe spirits live in them.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

Source: Spirited Away, Volume 1

People

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

Dead

“From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”

Ray Bradbury book The Illustrated Man

Source: The Illustrated Man

Life

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”

Jeff VanderMeer book Annihilation

Source: Annihilation

Truth

“I liked you better when you were this timid little kid. What happened?”
“I started living with you guys.”
“Oh, right.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: The Dead Girls' Dance

Guy

“When we're identified with Awareness, we're no longer living in a world of polarities. Everything is present at the same time.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

World, Time

“I’ve heard people say that the hardest thing in the world is to live with someone you don’t love. But I’ve always thought it would be far more difficult to live with someone who doesn’t love you.”

Amanda Stevens (1977)

Source: The Kingdom

Love, People, World

“The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Antarctica

Source: Antarctica

World, Idea, Time

“I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch 22

Strong

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Epigraph
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964)

Life

“You live out the confusions until they become clear.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“Root out the violence in your life, and learn to live compassionately and mindfully. Seek peace. When you have peace within, real peace with others is possible.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Life, Peace, Learning, Peaceful

“A paradox: The things you don’t need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Books, Art, Wine

“I can’t believe this night. I was supposed to be applauded and instead, I’m ruined. I swear to God in heaven if I ever see that man again, I will commit murder. (Tory)
Well, if you need help moving the body, you know where Kim and I live. (Pam)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

God, Help, Night

“The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Silence

“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”

Laurie Anderson (1947) American musician

Books, World, Literature, Learning

“Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there's no such thing as God.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

Love, God, Cars, Dance

“I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

Secret, World, Madness

“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

"The Mohican"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)

“Look at the way you live. You've sold out. Next thing I know you'll become a Republican." She shook her head. "Where are the values I raised you with?”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Way

“They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

Source: The Call of the Wild

Life

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

Annie Dillard book The Living

Source: The Living

Books, Reading

“You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Source: The Japanese Lover

Life, Happiness, Reality, Waiting

“No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

World, Reality

“Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo.
"Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

“The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.”

Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) comedian and social critic

People

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live.”

Natalie Babbitt (1932–2016) American children's writer and illustrator

Variant: Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.
Source: Tuck Everlasting: Scholastic Book Guides

Life, Death, Fear

“Just like in bodybuilding, failure is also a necessary experience for growth in our own lives, for if we're never tested to our limits, how will we know how strong we really are? How will we ever grow?”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Failure, Strong

“Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

Source: Conversations with Don Delillo

World

“some men never
die
and some men never
live

but we're all alive
tonight.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Men

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Way, Parting, Madness

“Do not try to explain feelings. Live everything intensely and treasure what you feel as a gift from God.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

God, Feeling

“I want to live till I die. No more, no less.”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

“I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.”

Frank Bruni (1964) American journalist

Source: Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater

People

“You are safe," he said firmly. "You have my name and my family, my clan, and if necessary, the protection of my body as well. The man willna lay hands on ye again, while I live.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Family

“Shut up. Asshole. (Shahara)
I live for your endearments. (Syn)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Fire

“There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for
life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….
If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,
not what pays”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Life

“Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

Life, Sadness

“Happiness is the experience of living every moment with love, grace and gratitude.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Love, Happiness, Gratitude

“having
someone think of me that way was like discovering
a new window in the room i'd lived in all my life.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

Life, Way, Thinking

“Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

World, Star, Dead

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Life, Death

“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory —
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Music, When Soft Voices Die http://www.readprint.com/work-1367/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821) Source: The Complete Poems

Love, Art, Music, Sense

“I like living, breathing better than working… my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Art

“I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Life, Drink, Forgetting

“We may get knocked down on the outside, but the key to living in victory is to learn how to get up on the inside.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

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

Learning, Victory

“As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Way, Change

“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand or pity him”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych

Understanding

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.”

Meg Cabot The Princess Diaries

Source: The Princess Diaries

Fear, Courage

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Love, Sea

“Sometimes a b. f. f makes you go W. T. F but without them we'd all be a little less richer in our lives.”

Cecily von Ziegesar (1970) American writer

Source: You're the One That I Want

“Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

People, Peace, Animals, Wise

“I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

Letter to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (4 June 1837)

Dreams

“She is intensely human, and lives to look upon life.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Life

“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life

“Where's Amy?" Ian put in. "Will you please get her to call that Evan character? He rings here twenty times a day. He's either the most mule-headed person who ever lived, or he really likes your sister. She has to have mercy on him–on all of us!”

Gordon Korman book The Medusa Plot

Source: The Medusa Plot

Sister, Time, Personality

“I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

Life, Business

“I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Life, God, Religion, Drawing

“I think most people live in fiction… That's how you keep your fragile body intact.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

People, Thinking

“God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, God, Passion

“Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

People, World, Idea

“If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

“It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Different Seasons (1982), Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
Variant: Either get busy living or get busy dying
Source: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons

Business, Motivational

“Oh, no-" They weren't even on the runway, and Jonah's father was already immersed in his BlackBerry. "Remember those 'Live Large with the Wiz Generation' posters? Well, guess how that translates into Chinese- 'Jonah Wizard Makes Your Ancestors Fat'.”

Gordon Korman book The Emperor's Code

Source: The Emperor's Code

“How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Death, Birth

“To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

“Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Travel

“He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“For five years it had been his absolute truth. Jem and Will. Will and Jem. Will Herondale lives, therefore Jem Carstairs lives also.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Truth

“This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

Life, Dreams, Sleep

“America used to live by the motto "Father Knows Best." Now we're lucky if "Father Knows He Has Children." We've become a nation of sperm donors and baby daddies.”

Stephen Colbert book I Am America (And So Can You!)

Source: I Am America

Children, Baby, For Father

“You make a living by what you get; you make a life by what you give.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Extensive research of writings by and about Churchill at the Churchill Centre http://www.winstonchurchill.org fails to indicate that Churchill ever spoke or wrote those words. Some sites list Norman MacEwen as the originator of the quote. Misattributed Variant: We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. Variant: We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

Life

“For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Life, Death, Women, Men

“The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: Telling Secrets (1991)

World, Weather

“Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH…”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Big Sur (1962)

Love, Life, Way, Girl

“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"Man alone, of all creatures of earth, can change his thought pattern and become the architect of his destiny." Actually said by Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in his Miracle of Forgiveness (1969), p. 114. This predates any of the misquotations.
Other forms: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." This is also misattributed to Albert Schweitzer.
James did say: "As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness."
Misattributed
Context: Man alone, of all the creatures on earth, can change his own patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives … It is too bad that most people will not accept this tremendous discovery and begin living it.

Change, Attitude

“Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2001: A Space Odyssey

1960s
Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) "Foreword"

Dead

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient”

Marilynne Robinson (1943) American novelist and essayist

Life

“Only by being prepared for your death can you ever truly live.”

Christopher Moore book A Dirty Job

Source: A Dirty Job

Death

“While you live, the revolution lives”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

Literature

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

44 min 50 sec
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Blues For a Red Planet [Episode 5]
Context: The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

Beauty, Way, Beauty

“I figured we'd be too busy running for our lives than for him to make a move anyway. (Dana)”

Jenna Black (1965) American writer

Source: Glimmerglass

Business