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Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
Every noble life becomes a revelation of the spirit which the love and joy of mankind cannot let perish from remembrance.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian
To keep from dying is not the same as "to live."
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Harkonnen
I believe everything in life is energy. If we're destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there's got to be a very powerful energy to fight that. I think we need more love in the world. We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that.
ELLEN DEGENERES, Good Housekeeping, Oct. 2011
Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like.
IVAN KLIMA, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, All the Pretty Horses
When we dead awaken.... We see that we have never lived.
HENRIK IBSEN, When We Dead Awaken
Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU, The Diary of a Chambermaid
- Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
- Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
- Until Death tramples it to fragments.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Adonais
The truth about the world ... is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
STEVE JOBS, Commencement address at Stanford University, Jun. 12, 2005
- Life is sad
- Life is a bust
- All ya can do is do what you must
BOB DYLAN, "Buckets of Rain"
Thus will we deal with life, my little help-meet. Will we not, eh? What though it blink at us like an owl that is blinded by the sun, we will yet force it to smile.
LEONID ANDREYEV, The Life of Man
- For drinking Life there are two cups:
- The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy --
- Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?
MARGARET ATWOOD, The Year of the Flood
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, The Crossing
"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."
"Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it."
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right — I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.
J. D. SALINGER, The Catcher in the Rye
To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.
BERTOLT BRECHT, On Politics and Society
Life is an illusion to be tailored to our needs.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Harkonnen
Man's life is entirely in his operations, which may all be classed under three heads: he thinks, he feels, and he acts -- these three modes of activity exhaust his powers.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE, The Doctrine of Life
As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.
BRAM STOKER, "The Jewel of the Seven Stars"
- Every day is the same thing out the door
- Feel further away then ever before
- Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
- Well, I’m lost somewhere
- I must have made a few bad turns
What is the meaning of life?... A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
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