LIFE QUOTES IX

quotations about life

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


What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?

JOHN GREEN

An Abundance of Katherines

Tags: John Green


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"

Tags: Alanis Morissette


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


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

Tags: Teresa of Avila


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


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"

Tags: Lola Ridge


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 doesn't retreat.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion


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


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"

Tags: Henry Abbey


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

Tags: James Baldwin


Life is made up of marble and mud.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

The House of the Seven Gables

Tags: Nathaniel Hawthorne


You can buy life only with life.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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

Tags: Frederik Pohl


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

Tags: Virginia Woolf


Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.

EMIL CIORAN

A Short History of Decay

Tags: Emile Cioran


If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.

ARNOLD BENNETT

The Reasonable Life

Tags: Arnold Bennett


How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Untouchable

Tags: John Banville