quotations about life
Life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they're precious.
STEPHEN KING
Joyland
In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is every where. Nature lives: every pore is bursting with Life ; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Studies in Animal Life
Life is wasted on the living.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
I Strove with None, for None was Worth My Strife
Life was like a batch of biscuits without the baking powder: flat, flat, flat.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Big Sky
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet
EMILY DICKINSON
"That it will never come again"
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
MARY OLIVER
"Sometimes", Red Bird
Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are Setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing -- Oh, make haste!
EDWARD FITZGERALD
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Life should be touched, not strangled.
RAY BRADBURY
Farewell Summer
Solve the problem of life? Live, and you solve it.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Life is being, not having.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Life does turn on so many queer things ... ball bearings and banana skins.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Paris Review, fall 2000
All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Surviving the Holocaust
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