Quotes about living
page 48

“This is Graceland. Home of the most famous musician in the world.”
“Michael Jackson lived here?”
“No, dummy,” Carter said. “Elvis Presley.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

World, Home

“My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.”

Aimee Bender (1969) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Willful Creatures

Love

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”

Mary Renault book The Persian Boy

Source: The Persian Boy

“Life needed a fast forward button. Because there were days you just don't want to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: Sweethearts

Life, Time, Speed

“investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make. it will not only improve your life, it will improve the lives of all those around you.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams Reaching Your Destiny

Life

“Father nevver once looked at any woman the way he looked at Mother, with joy and thanksgiving, as if she was a living wish, granted past all hope.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Nothing but Shadows

Hope, Way, Past, Joy

“The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Life, Fear, Memory

“You needn't die happy when your time comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from the beginning to the end and ka is always served.”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

Life, Happiness, Time

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

Anaïs Nin book The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Death, Children, Pleasure, Books

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Marriage, Funny

“Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

People, World, Universe, Joy

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.”

Meg Rosoff book How I Live Now

Variant: After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.
Source: How I Live Now

Time

“What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Law

“I would rather die then try to live without you”, “May you always love me and want me but never have me”, “May you never love anyone but me”.”

Jude Deveraux (1947) American writer

Love

“Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Teach me to die…”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

“No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Life

“It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Motivational

“They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.”

Philip Plait (1964) astronomer, skeptic

Source: Death from the Skies! (2008), p. 75-76
Source: Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...

Life, Feeling, Star, Time

“You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity)”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Quotes

“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden

Source: The Secret Garden

Forgetting

“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

“If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.”

Jodi Picoult book The Pact

Source: The Pact

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

“As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire and live by love though the stars walk backwards.”

Ben Sherwood book The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud

Source: The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud

Love, Star, Heart, Sea

“I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Imagination

“Each of us must live off the fruit of his thoughts in the future, because what you think today and tomorrow, next month and next year, you will mold your life and determine your future. You are guided by your mind.”

Earl Nightingale (1921–1989) American motivational speaker

Life, Thinking, Future

“Being present means living without control and always having your needs met.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Source: On Work And Money

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Books, Reading

“That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.”

Dennis Lehane book A Drink Before the War

Source: A Drink Before the War

Thinking, Reality

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

Sebastian Barry (1955) Irish author

Source: Days Without End: A Novel

Memory, Forgetting

“These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

Memory

“The past was gone. Nothing could change what had already been. Looking back at it, letting its wounds fester, indulging in regret was just a different, slower way to die. The living moved forward.”

Jim Butcher Captain's Fury

Source: Captain's Fury

Way, Change, Past

“For the first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.”

Michael Ondaatje (1943) Canadian writer

Source: Handwriting

Dreams, Past

“loving people live in a loving world. hostile people live in a hostile world. same world.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Love, Hostility, People, World

“One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

Dreams, Nature

“Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.”

Philippa Gregory book The White Queen

Source: The White Queen

“The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.”

Louise Penny book The Brutal Telling

Source: The Brutal Telling

Beauty, Nature, Tree, Time

“Is it not possible that we are still living in the Dark Ages, still mocking the suggestion of 'mystical' forces that we cannot see or comprehend.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Age

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book Middlesex

Source: Middlesex

Life, Way

“You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

Past

“The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure

Life, Spring, Boy, Universe

“such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe…”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Beauty

“Drink from me and live forever.
Lestat de Lioncourt”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Drink

“520. Living well is the best revenge.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Revenge

“If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Motivation, Universe, Evil

“We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Addressing a Bible class in Plains, Georgia (March 1976), as quoted in Boston Sunday Herald Advertiser (11 April 1976)
Pre-Presidency

Christ

“Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.”

John Grogan (1958) American journalist

Source: Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

Home, Waiting

“I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people's
glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin

People, Housing

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Love, Good Morning

“You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening
at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Learning

“Paintings are seldom guilty and often framed for crimes they did not commit. Some cover holes-holes in walls, holes in lives. Some make holes-in wallets, holes in hearts… in negative space.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Heart, Painting

“Live it well and this life can be grand.”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Hawksong

Source: Hawksong

Life

“They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives…”

Franz Kafka book The Great Wall of China

Source: The Great Wall of China

Soul, History, Sense, Change

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked. “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Fate, Lie, World, Boy

“To live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain--leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart.”

Brandon Sanderson Elantris

Source: Elantris

Heart, Personality

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

No. 1, He Who Binds
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792), Several Questions Answered

Life, Kiss, Joy

“You know, I've lived a long time," he told me, massaging my calf more firmly now. "And I met a lot of people. But I ain't never met a woman made me want to beat her to death as often as you.”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Hunt the Moon

Death, People, Time

“We must remember that the test of our religious principles lies not just in what we say, not only in our prayers, not even in living blameless lives - but in what we do for others”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection

“People would rather live in homes regardless of its grayness. There is no place like home.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

People, Home

“I don't know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will. I don't think i even want to. I am still a parabatai, but my other half is gone.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

World, Thinking

“The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

As quoted in Forbes (April 1948), p. 42
Variant: The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. . . . It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Pleasure, Support, Reading

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

“To live without you, only that would be torture."
"A day alone, only that would be death.”

Charles Addams (1912–1988) Cartoonist

Death

“Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don't do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.”

Aidan Chambers (1934) British children's writer

Source: Dying to Know You

Chance, Dependency

“They hadn’t counted on the highly controlled jabberjay having the brains to adapt to the wild, to pass on its genetic code, to thrive in a new form. They hadn’t anticipated its will to live.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“We live, we love. These are the choices we are given, to open doors or to close them. It is all we have, and it is enough”

Karen White (1964) American writer

Source: The Time Between

Love

“We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.”

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

World, Christ

“We spent our lives making livings.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“In this world of ours, the sparrow must live like a hawk if he is to fly at all.”

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

World, Flying

“So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every person a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them!”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Hunger, Education, Personality

“God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

Source: Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

Life, God, People, World

“Before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.”

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

Kiss

“You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said.”

Stephen King book Doctor Sleep

Source: Doctor Sleep

Personality

“You are not ashamed of our luuurve, are you, Jas?'
'Look, shut up, people might hear.'
'What do you mean, the people who live in the telephone?”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: Stop in the Name of Pants!

People

“Because letting someone in close meant they could hurt you. I knew all about that kind of fear. I lived with it.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Blue-Eyed Devil

Fear, Hurt

“AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Source: Private Lives an Intimate Comedy in Three Acts

People, Thinking

“It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Source: The Invitation

Dreams, Heart

“What kind of life have you lived little one? Where fair has anything to do with it? Life and death just are. Fair has nothing to do with it.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Life, Death

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.”

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

Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Context: The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Secret, World, Fear

“Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?”

Louis De Bernières (1954) English novelist

Source: Corelli's Mandolin

Time, Childhood

“It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Life, Soul, Imagination, Problem

“The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.”

Frank McCourt book Angela's Ashes

Source: Angela's Ashes

World, Faith

“How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning Living for its own sake isn't life. People need meaning as much as they need air.”

Daniel H. Wilson book Robopocalypse

Source: Robopocalypse

Life, People, Change, Personality

“Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

“Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and turn headlong down an immutable course.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

The Silent World by Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau with Frederic Dumas 2004 National Geographic Society, pg. 5

Change

“I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

Love, Learning

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”

Italo Calvino The Uses of Literature

Source: The Uses of Literature

Nature

“One heart fulfills all hearts.
All hearts lead to the same heart.
"Kingdom Hearts"
A place where the mighty hearts lives.
And where darkness is endlessly deep.”

Shiro Amano (1976) Japanese manga artist

Source: Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Vol. 1

Heart

“I have one brother and I live with four hundred guys. Girls under the age of fourteen are the most frightening creatures I have ever come across.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Age, Guy, Girl

“One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Love, World

“It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

Life, Memory

“That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.”

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

“I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

People, Feeling

“Their plan had been very simple: to stay together for the rest of their lives.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: P.S. I Love You

“We shall live even in this state of living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy all who would judge and destroy us.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Love, Death, Feeling

“Basically, men are afraid of women and can't handle the fact that they came out of the same thing they spend the rest of their lives trying to get back into.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Solipsist (1998)

Women, Men

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”

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

"Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false <br class="br">1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950) <br class="br">Variant: I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Pain, Youth, Solitude

“My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour.”

Jim Butcher book Fool Moon

Source: Fool Moon

People, Heart

Quotes about living page 48

Quotes about living
page 48