quotations about life
Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
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
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Life ... is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It's about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.
KENNETH RAND
"The World-Slave"
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
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
Human life when rightly lived is simple ... but it is not rightly lived while it is bound to a complexity of lusts, desires, and wants -- these are not the real life but the burning fever and painful disease which originate in an unenlightened condition of mind.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
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
Tell someone you love them because life is short, but shout it in Klingon because life is also terrifying and confusing.
ANONYMOUS
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
Three Soldiers
Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it, and tried.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
He whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.
HENRIK IBSEN
When We Dead Awaken
We had crossed from death into what certainly sounded like life. And not only did it sound like life, it looked like life; and not only did it look like life, it looked like a particular life, a life which was a particular reproach to me.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
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
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room