Quotes About Life

Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

DOES SUCH a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is

the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.

Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

Well—very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great—keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil.

there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway:

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.

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?

Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead

After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

Does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest 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?

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

life - whatever else it is - is short... maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me it was that first fall term in Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food - aquired then and largely I must admit in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class...

la vita è breve. Che il destino è crudele ma forse non casuale. Che la Natura (intesa come Morte) vince sempre, ma questo non significa che dobbiamo inchinarci e prostrarci al suo cospetto. Che forse anche se non siamo sempre contenti di essere qui, è nostro compito immergerci comunque: entrarci, attraversare questa fogna, con gli occhi e il cuore ben aperti.

I was having to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It's different

each of the painful problems in our lives contains valuable healing lessons. They teach us awareness and hopefully convince us to let go of our blind spots, prejudices, and tendencies to ignore our intuition and other growth lessons.