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Life — and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison — is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
NEIL GAIMAN, Death Talks About Life
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
GARRISON KEILLOR, "Could I have been any more inept?" Salon.com, Oct. 26, 1999
Study more how to die than how to live; if you would live till you were old, live as if you were to die when you are young.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
You know your life needs more excitement when your greatest challenge all week is removing the lint from your dryer's lint-screen all in one piece!
TOM WILSON, Ziggy, Jan. 16, 1998
I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
JOHN KEATS, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
- If we were not so single-minded
- about keeping our lives moving
- and for once could do nothing,
- perhaps a huge silence
- might interrupt this sadness
- of never understanding ourselves
- and of threatening ourselves with death
- Perhaps the world can teach us
- as when everything seems dead
- but later proves to be alive.
PABLO NERUDA, Extravagaria
A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.
CHINUA ACHEBE, Things Fall Apart
Life is a string of uncooked macaroni on a double strand of sewing thread. Not even spray painted gold. Some people have strings of expensive pearls for lives, but not me ... I have macaroni and sewing thread.
ANN WUEHLER, The Care and Feeding of Baby Birds
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
Life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.
GARRISON KEILLOR, A Prairie Home Companion, 2006
My life is one long blooper reel!
TOM WILSON, Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000
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
- The heart is like an instrument whose strings
- Steal magic music from Life's mystic frets.
GERALD MASSEY, "Wedded Love"
By the time you learn the rules of life, you're too old to play the game.
GRENVILLE KLEISER, Dictionary of Proverbs
Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Charles Brown, Sep. 30, 1820
Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
- Rest not! Life is sweeping by;
- Go and dare before you die.
- Something mighty and sublime
- Leave behind to conquer time!
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, "Haste Not--Rest Not"
Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
- Still all the day the iron wheels go onward,
- Grinding life down from its mark.
GERALD MASSEY, "The Cry of the Children"
DAN SIMMONS, The Rise of Endymion
The bright side of life's unpredictability is that it's not over until it's over. As dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs that you find yourself in are, progress is nevertheless being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming.
MARION WINIK, Ladies Home Journal, Dec. 2008
Life is a wheel, and if you wait long enough, it always comes back around to where it started.
Life, how sweet soever it seems, is a draught mingled with bitter ingredients; some drink deeper than others before they come at them: But, if they do not swim at the top for youth to taste them, it is ten to one but old age will find them thick at the bottom. And it is the employment of faith and patience, and the work of wisdom and virtue, to teach us to drink the sweet part down with pleasure and thankfulness, and to swallow the bitter without reluctance.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Life like a shroud on men and women lies.
MAURICE BROWNE, "At Dusk"
Life is like a cocktail, made up for the most part of sweet things, and tinged with a dash of bitters. We must drain it to the dregs to get at the cherry, just as we must live a full and rounded life to know all its pleasures.
Let us all so live as we shall wish we had lived when we come to die; for that only is well, that ends well.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
We bring into the world a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the best; all the imaginations of the wise have been busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasure, or relieve it with counsel; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety; to some of these ends have been employed the instructions of Lawgivers, the reasonings of Philosophers, the inventions of Poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagancies of the Voluptuous; all the world is at work perpetually about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and the happier that little time we possess them; or else end the better when we lose them.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
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