quotations about life
Life is not a bed of roses.
ENGLISH PROVERB
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
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Women in Love
Some things in life are out of your control. You can make it a party or a tragedy.
NORA ROBERTS
Vision in White
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
Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Life doesn't do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
We cross the stream of life at different places. Some wade through the shallows in a drought, others have to swim across deep waters in a storm.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Life! Don't talk to me about life.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
Our daily lives have a kaleidoscopic quality, a feeling of walking down a breakfast buffet and spooning out things onto your plate. And there's a lot to eat at this brunch of experience. Too many pineapple rings, too many sausages, too much syrup.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
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.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
Life is no way to treat an animal.
KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country
Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84