quotations about life
Life is a string of uncooked macaroni on a double strand of sewing thread. Not even spray painted gold. Some people have strings of expensive pearls for lives, but not me ... I have macaroni and sewing thread.
ANN WUEHLER
The Care and Feeding of Baby Birds
Life is an illusion to be tailored to our needs.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints;
While it spinneth, there is light; stop it, all is darkness.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"Nephelidia"
Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Reveries over Childhood and Youth
Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Life! Don't talk to me about life.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Man reaches each stage in his life as a novice.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
Some things in life are out of your control. You can make it a party or a tragedy.
NORA ROBERTS
Vision in White
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
And life itself spoke this secret to me. "Behold," it said, "I am that which must ever overcome itself."
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
As long as you were prepared to stay in it life found room for you. Life was like that, helplessly promiscuous, a doorman who let everyone in.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk