quotations about life
Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Life is a banquet of unexpected flavors. Sometimes you like the taste, sometimes you don't.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Life doesn't retreat.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
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
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
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
I shall not say, our life is all in vain,
For peace may cheer the desolated hearth;
But well I know that, on this weary earth,
Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
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
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
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
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
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
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime