quotations about life
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
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
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
Life doesn't retreat.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Life is a banquet of unexpected flavors. Sometimes you like the taste, sometimes you don't.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
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
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
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
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
As a well spent day affords happy sleep, so does a life profitably employed afford a happy death.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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 just can't get used to life.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
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
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
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