quotations about life
Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
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
It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
FRED ALLEN
Fred Allen's Letters
This world is a vaporous jest at best,
Tossed off by the gods in laughter,
And a cruel attempt at wit were it,
If nothing better came after.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"A Gray Mood"
I have not wasted life, but life hath wasted me.
BHARTRHARI
"Against the Desire of Worldly Things"
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
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
Life is like sex. It's not always good, but it's always worth trying.
PAMELA ANDERSON
Star
Well yet, this life such as it is, yet we love it, and loath we are to end it; and if it be in hazard by the law, what running, riding, posting, suing, bribing, and if all will not serve, what breaking prison is there for it!
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Ninety-six Sermons
One of my teachers in grammar school, a nun, used to say, "La vie, c'est bien complique." I'm not sure what that meant to me at the time, but it's become the guiding principle of my life, my writing, my interactions with others. Life is very complicated indeed, and that's what makes it both difficult and interesting. Stereotypes, racism, xenophobia -- most negativity in the world comes out of the natural human desire to oversimplify. Life isn't simple.
JEANNETTE ANGELL
"A talk with author Jeannette Angell: From college lecturer to callgirl and back", Souixland, Oct. 8, 2004
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
Life is the tamer of the wild beast of humanity.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Childhood", A Soliloquy of Life
No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
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 and death have been lacking in my life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
prologue, Discussion
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