quotations about life
About the time we have subdued the fires of youth that threaten to consume us, we find ourselves battling with the infirmities of age.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
Life is being, not having.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you're young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there--in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Life should be touched, not strangled.
RAY BRADBURY
Farewell Summer
Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
MARY OLIVER
"Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982", Dream Work
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Fowls"
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
MARY OLIVER
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?", West Wind
Life is a series of obstacles. It's not supposed to be easy. It is how you deal with these obstacles that define you as a person.
RAUL CARRANZA
"UC San Diego grad with muscular dystrophy shows incredible strength to achieve his dreams", University of California, June 16, 2016
Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Life is all about people leaving.
SUSAN HUBBARD
The Society of S
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Time Lost and Found", Sunset
Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
You have not lost all when you have life.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
There is nothing men are so anxious to keep, and yet are so careless about, as life.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Life calls the tune, we dance.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Five Tales
Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
If a man knew how to live he would never die.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men