quotations about life
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.
JEROME K. JEROME
"Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"
Life -- and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison -- is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
NEIL GAIMAN
Death Talks About Life
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Rum Diary
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives ... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Blood of Amber
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Summer Crossing
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room
You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.
CHARLES SIMIC
My Noiseless Entourage
Black river of torture, writhing senselessly, whirlpool of life, in vain I search thee for one moment's rest.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
NORMAN MAILER
The Deer Park
Life is a cycle of both suffering and pleasure. One doesn't exist without the other.
VENERABLE POMNYUN
"How Can We Create A Happy Life For Ourselves And A More Just Society?", Huffington Post, August 15, 2016
Life -- a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
"Is Civilization Progress?", Reader's Digest, July 1964
Life is a garden forever in flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Entre-Acte Reveries"
A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence!
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Life
You have been good to me....
You have not made yourself too dear
to juggle with.
LOLA RIDGE
"Comrades"