quotations about life
Life is a banquet of unexpected flavors. Sometimes you like the taste, sometimes you don't.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
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
Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face
ALANIS MORISSETTE
"Ironic"
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
JOHN GREEN
An Abundance of Katherines
I shall not say, our life is all in vain,
For peace may cheer the desolated hearth;
But well I know that, on this weary earth,
Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
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
Life doesn't retreat.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
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"
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
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
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
What misery to live in this world! We are like men whose enemies are at the door, who must not lay aside their arms, even while sleeping or eating, and are always in dread lest the foe should enter the fortress by some breach in the walls. O my Lord and my all! How canst thou wish us to prize such a wretched existence?
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The House of the Seven Gables
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
All research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life. That's life with a capital L. The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who ... would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten. Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We're one of them.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Modern Fiction", The Common Reader