quotations about life
Life is not life unless we can feel it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Nothing was certain; there were many strange twists and devious turns as one hopped down the overgrown bunnytrail of life.
STEPHEN KING
"Big Driver", Full Dark, No Stars
You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratchers were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Life asks for a preparation as complete as we can afford; the great contest should be fought with spirit but with good temper always; we should never think the game lost while it is still going; and finally we should have the satisfaction of quitting the field able to say: I did my best.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
As you speed along the highway of life ... you might pause and consider. When everything's coming your way, maybe you're driving in the wrong lane.
JOSEPH FINDER
Paranoia
About the time we have subdued the fires of youth that threaten to consume us, we find ourselves battling with the infirmities of age.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and goddamn it, you refuse to let it get to you. you fight. you cry. You curse. Then you go about your business of living. That's how I've done it. There's no other way.
MARILYN MONROE
My Story
The trouble with life ... is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending.
MARTIN AMIS
introduction, Experience
Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Life can be cruel and uncomfortable at times. That doesn't define you. It's how we survive and create a colorful life with our experiences. Good and bad.
PAMELA ANDERSON
interview, Parade Magazine, January 23, 2015
Life is too short to blend in.
PARIS HILTON
Confessions of an Heiress
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life -- It goes on.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, A New Treasury of Words to Live By
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Ethics of Ambiguity
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Time Lost and Found", Sunset
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World", Le Spleen de Paris