Quotes about living

page 56

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.”

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”

“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”

“The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”

“Facts are simple and facts are straight.
Facts are lazy and facts are late.
Facts all come with points of view.
Facts don't do what I want them to.
Facts just twist the truth around.
Facts are living turned inside out.”

“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”

“I would build a cloudy House
For my thoughts to live in;
When for earth too fancy-loose
And too low for Heaven!
Hush! I talk my dream aloud -
I build it bright to see, -
I build it on the moonlit cloud,
To which I looked with thee.”

“I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.”

“It’s better to die than to live in the knowledge that you’ve done something that needs forgiveness.”

“Love - true love - is a precious thing. It is painful, uncomfortable, makes fools of us all, but it is what breathes meaning and color and purpose into our lives.”

“I'm happy that I have brought laughter because I have been shown by many the value of it in so many lives, in so many ways.”

“The point wasn’t that you tried to live forever; the point was that you lived, and did everything you could to live well. The point was the choices you made and the people you loved.”

“To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived..”

“There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”

“My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.”

“I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?”

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I…”

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

“The longer you live, the better you get.”

“Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.”

“There are times when God leaves huge question marks as tools in our lives to stretch our our faith.”

“One of the most dynamic and significant changes you can make in your life is to make the commitment to drop all negative references to your past, to begin living now.”

“We could do it, you know," Gale says quietly.

"What?" I ask.

"Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it," says Gale.

I don't know how to respond. This idea is so preposterous.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

“he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”

“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.”

“Lively, intelligent, and quite immature, [Emily] usually burst out with exactly the comment that summed up the situation beautifully and therefore could never in politeness be said.”

“The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.”

“Live not for Battles Won.
Live not for The-End-of-the-Song.
Live in the along.”

“It is no way to live, to wait to love.”

“We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.”

“I know, but no matter what I choose I have to live with it. Forever. I have to be able to go forward and not look back anymore. Can you understand that?”

“Balthazar pledged to die defending his royal house of Lumuatere. Finnikin swore to be their protector and guide for as long as he lived. Lucian vowed he would be the light whom they traveled toward in times of need.”

“To live is to be hunted.”

“They laugh at this, the idea that one might keep herds of friendly deer or elk that walk happily to their slaughter whenever it's time for the human to eat meat. Some ask openly if there aren't consequences of a life so easy to live.”

“How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.”

“But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.”

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

“We spent our whole lives in unconsous excercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words”

“Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.”

“There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.”

“Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.”

“there is no moment more precious than the exact moment you are living now”

“The dead should not rule the living.”

“All people live in a fantasy in which they are the main character.”

“Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”

“I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am.”

“The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.”

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”

“The only way to have eternal love is to never let your heart forget what it’s like to live without it.”

“He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.”

“I'm dating three men, living with two more, and having occasional sex with two others. That's seven men. I'm like a pornographic Snow White. I think seven is plenty.”

“Appreciation - Learn to give flowers while people are still living”

“Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a hope. Today was another day to live and do one's best to love”

“I suppose you could call me… Soot," said the thing. "Yes… Soot. I have breathed it, lived in it, and eaten it for so long that it is a fitting name."
"Eaten it?" asked Suzy. "Why eat soot?"
"Boredom," said Soot.”

“Sometimes… you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.”

“There are two kinds of people,’ she’d said. ‘Those who coast through life like ducks in a row, following one after the other, and those who ride the waves.’” Tears spilled down my cheeks, and my voice cracked. “‘Ride the waves, baby, and live. Live.”

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

“You two. You can do a cleaning spell."
One slurred, "But Nixie, I'm really pre-hung-over."
Nix's eyes went wide. "Do it, or the photos go live!"
The witch shook her fist to the sky, crying, "Damn you, Valkyrie! Damn you and your digital ways!”

“Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.”

“Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.”

“A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.”

“Well, I live a double life. Tonight, I'll escort you to dinner. Then I have to rush home and finish my calculus homework.'
'You're not joking, are you?'
'I never joke about calculus homework.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“they danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.”

“Humans were so stupid. They had something so precious, and they barely safeguarded it at all. They threw away their lives for money, for packets of powder, for a stranger's charming smile.”

“Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.”

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

"Well, try and pretend!" snaps Effie. Then she composes herself and beams at me. "See, like this. I'm smiling at you even though you're aggravating me.”

“I have a black sense of humor. You try living my life, see what color yours turns.”

“A good book should leave you…. slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.”

“Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive.”

“Now, I'm not very vain. If I'd ever been, making my living covered in various grease and dirt mixtures would have cured me quickly. Still, I wasn't up to facing two sexy men when I had one eye swollen mostly shut and half of my face black and blue.”

“If I can laugh, I can live.”

“You kidding? So many preservatives in these things, I'll live forever.”

“Learn how to live and you'll know how to die; learn how to die, and you'll know how to live.”

“Something with inner beauty will live forever, like the scent of a rose.”

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

“I wish there is a world where any one can know the truth and speak there mind with freedom without having to fear for their lives (Rinko, Basara, Vol. 13)”

“In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.”

“We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered.”

“I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.”

“Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”

“Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.”

“Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough”

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”

“To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.”

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

“Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.”

“We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.”

“I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.”

“I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)”

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

“Don't fear death, fear the un-lived life”