quotations about life
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
JOHN GREEN
An Abundance of Katherines
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
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
Life is a banquet of unexpected flavors. Sometimes you like the taste, sometimes you don't.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
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
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Life doesn't retreat.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
But frankly, take life as it is--life, I mean, regarded by itself--life on this earth, without a thought of the hereafter, your life, my life, human life in general, considered under its purely earthly aspects and relationships; let us look at it as a whole, and we must admit that it is not all darkness; it has its crimson dawns, its rosy sunsets. It is not all clouds, it is not all winter; but it has its summer days in which "it is a luxury to breathe the breath of life."
JAMES PLATT
"Is Life Worth Living?", Platt's Essays
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
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
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
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
That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
Life is a muddle. It seems a brilliant muddle, if you are an optimist; a dull one, if you aren't; but in neither case can you deny that it is the muddlers who keep it going.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB