Quotes about living
page 44

“All of us have our own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These inner assumptions rule and govern our lives. A suggestion has no power in and of itself. its power arises from the fact that you accept it mentally.”

Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Fear

“She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere."

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

Health, Sense

“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.”

J. Sheridan Le Fanu book Carmilla

Source: Carmilla

World, Girl, Summer

“When you live a life without questions, you're unprepared for the questions when they come.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnWholly

Life, Question

“I'm going to tell you a secret. Our lives are shaped by the future, not by the past. Once you decide how you want your life to be, all you need to do is live into that future.”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall

Life, Secret, Past, Future

“Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.”

Christopher McDougall (1962) American journalist and writer

Source: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

People, Way, Nature

“It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”

Naomi Novik book Uprooted

Source: Uprooted

Time, Forgetting

“I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.”

Edward Albee (1928–2016) American playwright

“I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”

Jack London book The Turtles of Tasman

Source: The Turtles of Tasman

Singing, Heart

“Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

“It is good that a man's enemies want him dead, for it proves he has lived a life of worth.”

Forrest Carter (1925–1979) Political speechwriter, politician, novelist, memoirist

Source: The Outlaw Josey Wales

Life, Dead

“Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.”

Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) American playwright

Graduation

“She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.”

Marguerite Duras book The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Source: The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Waiting

“We live for books.”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

Benno of Uppsala
The Name of the Rose (1980)

Books

“Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

People, Soul, Change

“And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you
all through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,
Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-
And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Mine the Harvest

Life, Pain

“We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

People

“Life was not longer something to endure, but to live.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Life

“If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Life

“New rules. If you are smart enough to live, you won’t hit Charles’s mate in front of his father.”

Patricia Briggs book Cry Wolf

Source: Cry Wolf

“A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.”

Hunter S. Thompson The Rum Diary

Source: The Rum Diary

“This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Life, Waiting

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach….”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Happiness, Way, Wine, Singing

“One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

Life, Memory

“You are the answer to every prayer I've offered. You are a song, a dream, a whisper, and I don't know how I could have lived without you for as long as I have.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Dreams

“What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Time

“Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Life, Beauty, Art, Joy

“If you did not indulge in fantasies, how else would you know if you were living an interesting life?”

Alethea Kontis (1976) American writer

Source: Enchanted

Life

“Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Dreams, Reality

“If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

God, Art, Christ

“To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Notebook entry, London, 1889-05-12.

Way, Waiting

“I live because I do not exist.”

Dave Eggers book What Is the What

What Is the What

“You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Life, Fear

“We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom He has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control

Life, God, Dead

“If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Love, Feeling, Time, Sun

“Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

People, Truth, Sadness

“Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Variant: It is because the spirit knows deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else. And in that small distance, lives are changed.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala

Death, Change

“Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.”

Roger A. Caras (1928–2001) American photographer

Life, Dogs, For Mother

“No, none of us seem so very real.

We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other.

Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Tell-All

Source: Tell-All

Truth, Mountain, Support

“There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.”

Jim Crace book Being Dead

Source: Being Dead

Death, Birth

“life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Life, War

“She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”

Sarah Waters The Night Watch

Source: The Night Watch

Housing

“A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

“Everyone when they are young knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

“When you are measuring life, you are not living it.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)
Variant: When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
Source: The Time Keeper

Life

“For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Life, Men, Books, Age

“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions… but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 11
Atticus Finch
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Thinking, Personality

“If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Change

“For every thing that lives is Holy.”

William Blake book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Notes for an oration at Braintree (Spring 1772)
1770s

Men

“The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.”

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

Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Love

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

William James, "Is Life Worth Living?," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).
Misattributed

Life, Help, Inspirational, Depressing

“Paul patted Mrs. O'Leary's snout. The living room shook —BOOM, BOOM, BOOM—which either meant a SWAT team was breaking down the door or Mrs. O'Leary was wagging her tail.
I couldn't help but smile.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Smile, Help

“When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Jealousy

“Um, sorry. I cant read the last line."
"Fish. Have you stolen any fish from the holy lakes?"
"I lived in Kansas.. So.. no”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Fish, Reading

“No sign, so far, of anything sinister—but I live in hope.”

Agatha Christie book Cat Among the Pigeons

Source: Cat Among the Pigeons

Hope

“I have no intent. I have no reason to live, that's all. When I'm gone, I don't want to be remembered.”

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

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

“Hazel screamed at the top of her lungs, but it was a scream of delight. For the first time in her life-in her two lives-she felt absolutely unstoppable.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Life, Time

“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Life

“may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living”

E.E. Cummings Him

Source: Him

Secret, Bird, Heart

“If it's true, why do they leave us to live like this? With the hunger and the killings and the Games?" And suddenly I hate this imaginary underground city of District 13 and those who sit by, watching us die. They're no better than the Capitol.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Hunger, Hate, Game

“Ever, if I’ve learned nothing else in my six hundred years of living, it’s that people hate change almost as much as they hate for their beliefs to be challenged.”

Alyson Nöel (1965) writer

Source: Night Star

Hate, People, Learning, Change

“Be prepared for the worst, my love, for it lives next door to the best.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Love

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

People

“You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it… But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J. R. Isidore”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

People, Change

“You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It`s you who makes me a person.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Life, Memory, Time, Personality

“There is the world that should be and the world that is. We live in one and must create the other.”

Jim Butcher Turn Coat

Source: Turn Coat

World

“There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.”

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal

Dead

“Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

Life, Sun

“… the human spirit knows, deep down that all lives intersect.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala

“As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we’re really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Life, Death, Health

“I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural.. to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Hate, Fear, Jealousy, Nature

“Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove”

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) English dramatist, poet and translator

Source: The Complete Plays and Poems

Love, Pleasure, Romantic, For Him

“we can not prepare for defeat and expect to live a life in Victory.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Life, Victory

“Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.”

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

“A home to come back to every day of their lives.
Where they would all belong or long to be.
A place on the Jellicoe Road.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Home

“Your life is yours alone, rise up and live it!- Richard, Faith of the Fallen”

Terry Goodkind Faith of the Fallen

Quotes from the Books
Source: Faith of the Fallen

Life, Faith

“No chance. It'd be like cutting off our hands."
"Then learn to live without your hands."
"No, because then we won't be able to do this," Ben says, giving him the finger […]”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Learning, Chance

“and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that's where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Love, World, Dependency

“Lots of different ways to live and lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.”

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

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Way

“So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997) <br class="br">In Concert

Dead

“Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Earth, Act III, sc. iii, l. 113
Variant: Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life.
Source: Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Life, Death, Sleep

“She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

Life, Knowledge

“I live in the light,
But carry my dark with me.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Source: The Dead of Night

Light

“You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Source: The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life

Love, Death, Parting

“Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Source: The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

World, Victory

“when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Business

“Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Source: Innocence

Life, People, Books, World

“Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Variant: Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.
Source: America for Me (1909), Lines 9-12.

Dreams, Home, Flowers, Study

“That's the point, isn't it? We have to live on, no matter how hard it gets. We'll win in the end.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

“No one knows why, but second only to eating the brains of the living, the dead love affordable prefab furniture.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Source: The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

Love, Dead

“Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Source: All The Pretty Horses: All The Pretty Horses

Question

“How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Pain, Truth

“If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease… Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.”

Richard Matheson book What Dreams May Come

Source: What Dreams May Come

Death, Men, Feeling, Sleep

“This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Source: The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

Dreams, Hope, Time

“We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program for our lives.”

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

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Idea

“He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Lyra to Pan in Ch. 38 : The Botanic Garden
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)
Context: "I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."
"He said we had to build something…"
"That’s why we needed our full life, Pan... we wouldn’t have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build…"

Life, World

Quotes about living page 44

Quotes about living
page 44