Quotes About Life

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

I realised,' she said, 'that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward - or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom- and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life.

But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.

realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.

Il destino, ha detto, non è che verità allo stato naturale.

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time? Why was it so difficult to live day after day with people and still remember that you were distinct from them and that this was your one mortal life?

The parts of life that are suffocating', Angeliki said, 'are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents' own desires

was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,' she said, 'to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work.

I believe there are certain moments in life that don't obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!

how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.

In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

She was stepping off the pavement into the road and she felt it, a sudden sense of dislocation, almost a sensation of something giving way. She waited for the feeling to pass but it didn't: she returned home with it, and when she woke the next morning it was still there. She couldn't, as she said, give a name to it, but one consequence of it was that from that day she felt she was watching life from the outside rather than being part of it.

The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act.

O que Ryan havia aprendido com isso era que os seus fracassos vivem voltando para você, enquanto os seus sucessos são algo de que você precisa sempre se convencer.

Não ter uma identidade na qual se escorar tornava você um escritor melhor, você via a vida com olhos menos atormentados.

I guess it reminded me of having a kid,' she said finally. 'You survive your own death,' she added, 'and then there's nothing left to do except talk about it.