- The whole world's a bottle,
- And life's but a dram,
- When the bottle gets empty,
- It sure ain't worth a damn.
- When I consider Life, 'tis all a cheat;
- Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;
- Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:
- To-morrow's falser than the former day;
- Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
- With some new joys, cuts off what we possessed.
Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Middlesex
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
It's only life. We all get through it.
The unfairness of life is indicative of trees. I planted twenty trees on the same block. It's so fucking weird. Six became huge. One is giant. And there are some little shitty ones. Same soil. Same water. Same seed. But those little ones just don't grow. I can't explain it.
TIM ALLEN, Esquire, Nov. 2011
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
Life is what you do while you're waiting to die.
DONALD TRUMP, Playboy, Mar. 1990
A truce to philosophy! — Life is before me and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread.
MARY SHELLEY, The Last Man
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Middlesex
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
There’s a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
SAUL BELLOW, AGNI interview, 1997
I look at it this way: How much of the day are you awake? You think, "I've gotta get that dry cleaning, I gotta get this going, and this, and this, and this." And all of a sudden it's dinnertime. And then there's a moment of connection with your spouse or your friends. Then you read and go to bed. Wake up and then it's the same all over. You're not awake, you're not living, you're not experiencing. We start early medicating ourselves. We start kids early, on TV and video games and so on.
TIM ALLEN, Reader's Digest, Oct. 2001
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
JOE BIDEN, Promises to Keep
- The Road goes ever on and on
- Down from the door where it began,
- Now far ahead the Road has gone,
- And I must follow if I can,
- Pursuing it with eager feet,
- Until it joins some larger way
- Where many paths and errands meet.
- And whither then? I cannot say.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN, The Fellowship of the Ring
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
SAUL BELLOW, Henderson the Rain King
We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.
RONALD REAGAN, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy -- who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity -- only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart -- does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.
In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
ISAAC ASIMOV, Fantastic Voyage II
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.
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
JOHN DOS PASSOS, Three Soldiers
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, prologue, Discussion
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