quotations about life
What misery to live in this world! We are like men whose enemies are at the door, who must not lay aside their arms, even while sleeping or eating, and are always in dread lest the foe should enter the fortress by some breach in the walls. O my Lord and my all! How canst thou wish us to prize such a wretched existence?
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
I think we can all agree life is a lot better when a dog chasing bears is one of the biggest news stories of the day.
JOHN HALTIWANGER
"This Savage Dog Chased Bears Out Of Its Neighborhood Like A Total Boss", Elite Daily, September 1, 2016
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
JOHN GREEN
An Abundance of Katherines
Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face
ALANIS MORISSETTE
"Ironic"
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
attributed, Lindbergh: Flight's Enigmatic Hero
If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.
ROBERT STONE
Dog Soldiers
I just can't get used to life.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Modern Fiction", The Common Reader
Life is more sweet than I
Knew: the shifted scene
Less wavered, more trimmed with light,
Than the years before.
Look down. People pass over the ice
As a file of thin ghosts creep,
And fade beyond the hill.
You, and you, and you--
Small souls, shrinking away.
MARK TURBYFILL
"Journey"
We look back upon our life only as on a thing of broken pieces, because our misses and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have done and attained.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The House of the Seven Gables
Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
ANAIS NIN
diary, Mar. 6, 1936