quotations about life
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
EDWARD ALBEE
The Play About the Baby
Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
To live is to war with trolls.
HENRIK IBSEN
dedicatory lines, Peer Gynt
Mortal! that cull'st the flowers of life,
Think not to escape the thorn.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"The Thorn of Life"
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
Life is an incurable disease.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
To Dr. Scarborough
Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
My life is one long blooper reel!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000
Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Charles Brown, Sep. 30, 1820
In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Fantastic Voyage II
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
JOHN BARTH
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
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 not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84
No man ever sailed over exactly the same route that another sailed over before him; every man who starts on the ocean of life arches his sails to an untried breeze.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius.
JULIE ANDREWS
Star Weekly, Apr. 29, 1965
If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?
ROBERT FULGHUM
Uh-Oh
Life is short, if we are only said to live when we enjoy ourselves; and if we were merely to count up the hours we spent agreeably, a great number of years would hardly make up a life of a few months.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères