Quotes About Life

The thing is,' he said,' 'that kind of life - the parties, the drugs, the staying up all night - is basically repetitive. It doesn't get you anywhere and it isn't meant to, because what it represents is freedom... And to stay free... you have to reject change.

Muutoksen ja toiston kaava on niin tiukasti yhteydessä tietynlaiseen harmoniaan elämässä, ja vapauden harjoittaminen on alisteista sille aivan kuin opinkappaleelle. Muutoksia täytyy annostella kohtuudella kuin vahvaa viiniä.

I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life. It was like a contamination, Jeffers: it got into everything and turned it bad. I don't think I realised how many parts of life there were, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness.

suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

it means, simply, that our manner of life is dishonest, that it offers too few opportunities for self-expression, and that, for some people, there is too great a disjuncture between how things seem and how they actually feel.

built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked.

you survived your own death and there was nothing left to do but to talk about it, to strangers on a plane or whoever would listen

Perhaps it follows, he said, that people who live in the sun don't take responsibility for their own happiness.

I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art

There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

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. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exist in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal -- or can be.

There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman's life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

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. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.

You could spend your whole life', she said, 'trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.

Doer, dói sempre. Só não dói depois de morto. Porque a vida toda é um doer.

Em arte a gente não quer astúcias intelectuais, mas vida pulsando, embora sem saber como pulsa e por que pulsa

Ms. Doman had this whole thing about how we have to tell stories about whatever happens to us, and then we can use those stories to decide whether out lives are happy or not, whether events have redeeming aspects or are totally hopeless, that it's really all about how we choose to shape and name things.

I have no wisdom to share on dating.

I often think that perhaps there is only a limited amount of memory going about the world, and that when it wants to live again, it steals its nest, like a cuckoo.

I had gone for the letters at once. The post always intoxicates me; everythin it throws on to the mat is a magic square or oblong which may alter your life.

So many of the best things in life ultimately come to one through preliminaries utterly insignificant. The rule of the game seems to be that you must be unaware. If you enter it in a state of expectancy, with hope or dream or plan, it will not come to pass.

It is too late! oh, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers When each had numbered more than fourscore years LONGFELLOW

The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.