LIFE QUOTES XXXVIII

quotations about life

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

JOHN LENNON

"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)", Double Fantasy

Tags: John Lennon


Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Studies in Classic American Literature

Tags: D. H. Lawrence


Human life is a pilgrimage from the unknown to the unknown. No one knows whence he emanated or whither he is bound.

FEMI ABBAS

"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016


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

Tags: James Baldwin


The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.

JEROME K. JEROME

"Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"


It's a great time to be alive and talking about life. We just learned that geologists found what appear to be fossilized stromatolites in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland. That suggests life popped up on Earth ridiculously soon after the planet formed. And last we learned about the discovery of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. Meanwhile we now know planets are common. Maybe the universe is simply throbbing with life!

JOEL ACHENBACH

"The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on Earth", Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016


For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.

ROBERT BROWNING

A Death in the Desert


Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Summer Crossing

Tags: Truman Capote


This is the strange contract between life and language: language keeps naming and life, like a woman seductively escaping her seducer's caress, keeps just a little beyond its names.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live

Tags: Glen Duncan


Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.

KOBO ABE

The Ark Sakura

Tags: Kobo Abe


Activity does not necessarily mean life.

PHILIP K. DICK

A Scanner Darkly


I don't know why life isn't constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don't always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don't know why it's not more like it is in the movies, why things don't come out neatly and lessons can't be learned when you're in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.

ANNE LAMOTT

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith


Life -- a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.

CHARLES LINDBERGH

"Is Civilization Progress?", Reader's Digest, July 1964

Tags: Charles Lindbergh


When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.

HENRIK IBSEN

When We Dead Awaken

Tags: Henrik Ibsen


Work, whiskey, and cards were life.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams

Tags: Henry Adams


Ah! this beautiful world ... Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly, and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Hyperion


It is a matter of embracing one's only life, even though this life so often seems to be, merely, one's doom. And it is, in a way, though not "merely." But to refuse the doom of one's only life is to be trapped outside all nourishment.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: James Baldwin


Life
You have been good to me....
You have not made yourself too dear
to juggle with.

LOLA RIDGE

"Comrades"

Tags: Lola Ridge


I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

speech during the Great March on Detroit, Jun. 23, 1963

Tags: Martin Luther King, Jr.


Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.

SAUL ALINSKY

Reveille for Radicals

Tags: Saul Alinsky