Quotes About Life

Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

We were silent, contemplating the awfulness of this, me feeling as if I had experienced in these few words the entire weight and sweep of Kotku's life, and Boris's.

Ninguém nunca, jamais, vai conseguir me convencer de que a vida é uma coisa incrível e gratificante. Porque, esta é a verdade: a vida é catástrofe.

Tenemos el arte para no morir de la verdad.   NIETZSCHE

belki onun tepkisi de benimki gibi olur, diyordum içimden. belki bütün bu cinayetleri asl?nda olduÄŸu gibi bencilce yap?lm?? bir kötülük olarak görmek yerine kötü, ac?kl? ve hatta pitoresk bir vahÅŸet olarak görürdü. (''ben hayatta her ÅŸeyi yapt?m,'' diye böbürlenmez miydi yaÅŸl? tolstoy, ''bir adam bile öldürdüm.'')

Nil sub sole novum [...] Qualsiasi azione, nella pienezza del tempo, sprofonda nel nulla.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

but I liked the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffeeshop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into?

There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern, you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

Dear me, you are being truthful today," he said, with remarkable perspicuity. "Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction.…

I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.

We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it? To live.

Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe.

It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone. I

V. We have art in order not to die from the truth. —NIETZSCHE

meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.

Esas imágenes que te llegan al corazón y lo abren como una flor, imágenes que se abren a una belleza tan grande que puedes pasarte toda la vida buscando sin encontrarla.

but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?