Quotes about living
page 45

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

People, Problem

“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

Mountain, Wolf

“Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself.”

James Frey My Friend Leonard

Source: My Friend Leonard

Pain, Feeling, Suffering, Learning

“But I think we were walking around like we were invincible. And maybe that's a bad way to live your life. Because you're not invincible. Nobody is. And maybe now that we've learned that, we'll be better.”

David Levithan book Love Is the Higher Law

Source: Love Is the Higher Law

Life, Way, Thinking, Learning

“… whether he stayed or left, whether they walked the same path or not. They could live on opposite sides of the world, and she would still be his.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Mine Till Midnight

World

“Love is the grand prize and the garbage heap. Love is a spiritual root canal and the only thing that makes life worth living. Love is a little taste of always and a big bite of nothing. And love is everything in between these extremes.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Source: True Love

Love, Life

“Live the life you always wanted to live. Avoid criticizing others and concentrate on fulfilling your dreams.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

Life, Dreams

“All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

Clothes

“Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Fate, Teachers

“You are the weirdest girl ever.”
“Please. You live with Eve.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: The Dead Girls' Dance

Girl

“Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.”

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

Men, Sense

“Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

Memory, Heart

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Star, Universe

“Hemingway has his classic moment in "The Sun Also Rises" when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Variant: There is a classic moment in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that’s all I can say too.
Source: Prozac Nation

Sun

“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”

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

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

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

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

Travel, Soul

“Vampires don't live at all," she points out, "neither do we."
She has me there. "Fine, I'll go. But when Kurt leads his minions in a march around the cemetary with our heads on sticks, don't say I didn't warn you.”

Cynthia Leitich Smith (1967) American writer and poet

Source: Eternal

“I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Women, Girl, Thinking

“It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

LOVE (1972)

Love, Hope, Joy

“The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Truth, Lie

“You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Mermaid Chair

Source: The Mermaid Chair

World, Home

“If you want to kill me, despise me, hate me, and live in an unsightly way… Run, and cling to life, and then some day, when you have the same eyes as I do, come before me”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Life, Hate, Way

“Staying alive is nice, but you can’t do that forever. It’s how you live the life you have while you have it.”

Frank E. Peretti book Monster

Source: Monster

Life

“People learned to live with the
most unimaginable things.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

People, Learning

“Go to Idris. You’re safer there, but don’t be trusting, and don’t let your guard down. I need you to live.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“You live by what you thrill to, and there's the end of it.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

“Disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter III: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals — continued", page 105 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=118&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image <br class="br">The Descent of Man (1871)

Love

“we're responsible for our own lives.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God

Feeling, Time, Personality

“… only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Way, Sense, Time

“Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.”

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

Beauty, Nature, Beauty

“That's how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I'm still waiting.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: How to Save a Life

Life, Feeling, Waiting

“The closer you live to God, the smaller everything else appears.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

God, Appearance

“Soon you give up, don't look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime.
Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.”

Marguerite Duras book The Malady of Death

Source: The Malady of Death

Love, Way, Night

“Will stared down at his hands. "My whole life wrecked, destroyed…"

"You're seventeen," Magnus said. "You can't have wrecked a life you've barely lived.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Life

“The living deserve attention, too”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Happiness, Hope, Forgetting

“War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

War

“That’s family for you. Can’t live with them, can’t murder them.”

Holly Black book Black Heart

Source: Black Heart

Family

“It took a lot of women like that, a lot of women who said "I'm not going to do what you expect me to do, because you have no idea what I'm capable of. I'm going to get dirty and use tools and live the way I want" to move the world forward.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Last Little Blue Envelope

Women, World, Way, Idea

“Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?”

Louise Penny book A Fatal Grace

Source: A Fatal Grace

Lying, Forgiveness

“Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.”

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Housing

“It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

Life, Death

“May you live all the days of your life.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 2

Life, Life, Cute, Anniversary

“It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Peace, Dead

“The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

“Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: Life is Elsewhere

Women, Men, World

“Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren't accompanied by regret.”

Laura Kasischke (1961) American writer

Source: The Raising

“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: What Are People For?

Life, Tree, Water, Animals

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

People, Freedom

“They're betting on how long I'll live!' I burst out. 'They're not my friends!”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“Let the world honor you, my Huntress. Live forever in the stars.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

World, Star

“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

Law, Time

“Living in your dreams meant bitter disappointment when you woke up.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: On the Edge

Dreams, Disappointment

“In the end, just three things matter:

How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go”

Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer

Love, Learning

“Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”

J.M. Coetzee book Summertime

Source: Summertime

People, Personality

“Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

“Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Source: Under the Glacier

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden & Civil Disobedience

Men, Communication

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat
Source: The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: Yet creeds mean very little... The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.

World, Fear, Funny

“To laugh is to live profoundly.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart. There's no getting over that.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

People, Help, Heart

“Live your life, dont endure it”

Kate Atkinson

Life

“We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

War

“living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.”

Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Life, Fear

“I would rather be a cripple and have your love for all of a single moment than to live as I am without ever having it.”

Rachel Hawthorne (1950) American author

Source: Waking Up With the Duke

Love

“Truly we work and live on a streetful of splendid people, whom we are to love and serve even if they are uninterested in us!”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Source: The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book

Love, People

“If I can live through the events,” she said, “I can get through the memories.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

Memory

“You can't blame anyone else,…, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Each others' lives are our best textbooks.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

“You ever think about this? Every year you live, you pass the anniversary of your death. Now you don't know what day it is, of course.”

Billie Letts book Where the Heart Is

Source: Where the Heart Is

Death, Thinking

“It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361)”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit

Sense, Learning

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Context: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.