quotations about life
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Life is a banquet of unexpected flavors. Sometimes you like the taste, sometimes you don't.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Life is more sweet than I
Knew: the shifted scene
Less wavered, more trimmed with light,
Than the years before.
Look down. People pass over the ice
As a file of thin ghosts creep,
And fade beyond the hill.
You, and you, and you--
Small souls, shrinking away.
MARK TURBYFILL
"Journey"
When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
We look back upon our life only as on a thing of broken pieces, because our misses and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have done and attained.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
I think we can all agree life is a lot better when a dog chasing bears is one of the biggest news stories of the day.
JOHN HALTIWANGER
"This Savage Dog Chased Bears Out Of Its Neighborhood Like A Total Boss", Elite Daily, September 1, 2016
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
But frankly, take life as it is--life, I mean, regarded by itself--life on this earth, without a thought of the hereafter, your life, my life, human life in general, considered under its purely earthly aspects and relationships; let us look at it as a whole, and we must admit that it is not all darkness; it has its crimson dawns, its rosy sunsets. It is not all clouds, it is not all winter; but it has its summer days in which "it is a luxury to breathe the breath of life."
JAMES PLATT
"Is Life Worth Living?", Platt's Essays
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising