Quotes About Life

Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain.

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

Nearby, an old man was similarly engaged in finding the pattern of his life in the depths of his glass.

Why live? Life was its own answer.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his butt.

Looking at her in the hospital he had thought, I don't know you, who you are, does it matter if we live or die?

This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide.

What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years.

It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn't life a play? Don't I play it well?

Nothing ever likes to die--not even a room. (p.23 --> The Veldt)

I know it. I know everything.' She waited a moment. 'What do you know?' 'No use making more people. People die.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, . . .

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late.

This summer night deep down under the stars was all the things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.

She looked at the skull and laughed. Death is a good thing in Mexico; it is a thing to talk of at dinner, at breakfast, with or without a drink, with or without a smile. (The Candy Skull)

The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years.

Thomas Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava. Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Molière, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw.

Riempiti gli occhi di meraviglie, vivi come se dovessi cadere morto fra dieci secondi! Guarda il mondo: è più fantastico di qualunque sogno studiato e prodotto dalle più grandi fabbriche.

Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glade cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead.

If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went.

The word on the jar was RELISH. And he was glad he had decided to live.