quotations about life
Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.
DAVID BALDACCI
One Summer
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
ANAIS NIN
On Writing
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Each life creates endless ripples.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don't forget.
ROBERT FULGHUM
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns
BOB DYLAN
"Highlands"
Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die,
Like spring flowers.
Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves, with bitter tears,
For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears,
Count the hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"A Question: To Fausta"
I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.
JACK LONDON
The Turtles of Tasman
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES
Leisure
Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.
ERIC BERNE
Games People Play
How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
Ah! what is human life?
How, like the dial's tardy-moving shade,
Day after day slides from us unperceiv'd!
The cunning fugitive is swift by stealth;
Too subtle is the movement to be seen;
Yet soon the hour is up--and we are gone.
EDWARD YOUNG
Busiris, King of Egypt: A Tragedy
If life gives you rotten eggs, make a crepe.
ALI MARGO
"Princess: Life is a bowl of cherries -- so throw that into your crepe", Aspen Times, May 19, 2016
The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart.
AMY LOWELL
"Petals", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.
MAY RILEY SMITH
"Sometime"
There is nothing at all in life, except what we put there.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree