LIFE QUOTES V
quotations about life
How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth, we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Tigers & Ice
The one thing life has taught me is that most people spend their lives bottled up inside their houses doing the things they hate.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Yerma
The worst of all fears is the fear of living.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
This is one of those days which I am obliged to record as almost a blank in my existence.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
diary, November 23, 1837
Come on, Marge, I want to shake off the dust of this one-horse town. I want to explore the world. I want to watch TV in a different time zone. I want to visit strange, exotic malls. I'm sick of eating hoagies. I want a grinder, a sub, a foot-long hero. I want to live, Marge! Won't you let me live? Won't you, please?!
HOMER SIMPSON
"Fear of Flying", The Simpsons
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Life is a moment stolen from eternity.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Life is a riddle we die in guessing.
CLARA MARCELLE FARRAR GREENE
"Before the Wedding"
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Seeds", The Triumph of the Egg
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
Life is but a prelude.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence -- or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Lost Worlds of 2001
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
"War Shrines", Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies
So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I'll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
JOANNE HARRIS
Chocolat
If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
HANNAH ARENDT
Men in Dark Times