quotations about life
One must live as he can.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.
BENTLEY LITTLE
The Resort
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
DANIEL HANDLER
(as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Your life is like a little flute complaining
A long way off, beyond the willow trees:
A long way off, and nothing left remaining
But memory of a music on the breeze.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Sonnets
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Could I have been any more inept?", Salon, Oct. 26, 1999
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Each life creates endless ripples.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
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
The unfairness of life is indicative of trees. I planted twenty trees on the same block. It's so fucking weird. Six became huge. One is giant. And there are some little shitty ones. Same soil. Same water. Same seed. But those little ones just don't grow. I can't explain it.
TIM ALLEN
Esquire, Nov. 2011
Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
LEWIS CARROLL
Sylvie and Bruno
Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange.
JACK LONDON
Tales of the North
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
He lived the life he lived, like anybody, I guess, and he paid his dues, like everybody. Maybe what I mean when I say he made his life so hard was that he always tried to pay his dues in front.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
In such a porcelain life one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bowles, Aug. 1858?
It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.
KENNETH RAND
"The World-Slave"