LIFE QUOTES XXXVIII

quotations about life

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


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


The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

DON DELILLO

Point Omega

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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

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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


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

JEROME K. JEROME

"Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"


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


Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.

KOBO ABE

The Ark Sakura

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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

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

HENRIK IBSEN

When We Dead Awaken

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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

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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

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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


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

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Activity does not necessarily mean life.

PHILIP K. DICK

A Scanner Darkly


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

LOLA RIDGE

"Comrades"

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To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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Work, whiskey, and cards were life.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams

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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