quotations about life
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
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
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
Everything is so comfortable; the tea-urn hisses so plainly, the toast is so warm, the breakfast so neat, the food so edible, that one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life?
WILLIAM BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
ANAIS NIN
On Writing
Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.
DAVID BALDACCI
One Summer
You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
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
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
preface, Autobiography
While there's life, there's hope.
ENGLISH PROVERB
To live is to war with trolls.
HENRIK IBSEN
dedicatory lines, Peer Gynt
Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Life is like patchwork: every day there is a fresh bit to be put on. We must understand more correctly how to fit in better the bits needed day by day in repairing this patchwork life of ours. As it is, the three-cornered bits too often get put into the square places; but it is essential for man's happiness that he comprehends and unhesitatingly accepts as a truism that it rests with us to make this patchwork to our own liking; that we have the power to shape this life of ours more regularly, harmoniously, and blend it more perfectly; and that our life as it is, or as it might be, depends upon whether this be done in the right spirit.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius.
JULIE ANDREWS
Star Weekly, Apr. 29, 1965
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
One must live as he can.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.
MAY RILEY SMITH
"Sometime"
Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don't forget.
ROBERT FULGHUM
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the Odyssey, and of Jane Austen -- the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours?
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science