If you turned the fabric of our lives over, I imagined the design on the backside would be woven in the bleak grays of doubt and fear.
STEPHENIE MEYER, Breaking Dawn
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.
JEROME K. JEROME, "The Materialisation of Charles and Mivanway"
In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves.
STEPHEN KING (as Richard Bachman), Blaze
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 sat in amazement, the translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there--life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.
SUE MONK KIDD, The Mermaid Chair
I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, "Miss Harriet"
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
ECKHART TOLLE, The Power of Now
The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.
JEROME K. JEROME, "Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ, Dark Rivers of the Heart
As you speed along the highway of life ... you might pause and consider. When everything's coming your way, maybe you're driving in the wrong lane.
Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.
ALFRED AUSTIN, "A Woman's Apology"
This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.
WM. PAUL YOUNG, The Shack
You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.
NICHOLAS SPARKS, The Notebook
Between a gasp and a sigh, a life can change forever.
Life is dangerous. That's what makes it interesting.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS, The Traveler
Calm down, you'll live longer.
RICHARD LAYMON, The Stake
Life is all about people leaving.
SUSAN HUBBARD, The Society of S
Life is often like that, the best balancing on a knife edge with the worst.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, Obsidian Butterfly
To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore.
AMBROSE BIERCE, "The Death of Halpin Frayser"
Life has an--an irony all its own. What you wish for, you get, but you discover that it's not what you want.
JOHN AUSTIN CONNOLLY, The Boys from Siam
- Ah, what is life!
- 'T is but a passing touch upon the world;
- A print upon the beaches of the earth
- Next flowing wave will wash away.
ANNA KATHERINE GREEN, "Life"
- A stream roars downward to a hidden sea
- That slumbers moonless, starless, without bound,
- Whence comes nor voice, nor form, nor any sound:
- The stream is Life, the sea--Eternity.
WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN, "Life"
- Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
- And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
- Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY, "Dolores"
- Life is the wave's deep whisper on the shore
- Of a great sea beyond.
HENRY ABBEY, "The Roman Sentinel"
Life isn't all holding four aces. When Old Sister Fate deals you a king, a tenspot, a trey and a couple of miserable deuces, grin and draw three cards. You never know what you'll come up with.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES, Poems and Paragraphs
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN, Hounded to Death
All research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life. That's life with a capital L. The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who ... would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten. Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We're one of them.
A somewhat depressing lesson that we learn from life is that there is no guaranteed sure-fire formula for happiness.
MICHAEL W. EYSENCK, Happiness: Facts and Myths
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