Quotes About Life

Aber ist es nicht außerordentlich merkwürdig, wie einem der Zufall Bücher in die Hände spielt, die etwas mit der eigenen Situation oder Lebensphase zu tun haben?

I have never, in all my life, been so desperately and wildly and painfully happy as I was then. It was so strong I couldn't believe it. I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness.

SLEEP, for you are not yet dead.

The important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

It is only in love and in war that we escape from the sleep of necessity, the cage of ordinary life, to a state where every day is a high adventure, every moment falls sharp and clear like a snowflake drifting slowly past a dark glistening rock, or like a leaf spinning down to the forest floor.

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

Die Zeit nimmt auf niemanden Rücksicht, ob es uns nun gefällt oder nicht.

It's a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won't accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won't accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

Los viejos saben por experiencia que a veces los recuerdos se alteran y el sentido cambia

NÆ°á»›c m?t ch?y trong gi?c ng? là gi?t nÆ°á»›c m?t th?t nh?t ch?y trong cuá»™c ??i c?a chúng ta. Nh?ng gi?t nÆ°á»›c m?t lúc th?c ch? là tá»± thÆ°Æ¡ng h?i mà thôi.

scarcely born, and then adult, and then old, and then dead.

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point I am entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere

she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeing to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments. or peaks, then nothing had happened to her for a long time; snd she could look forward to nothing much but a dwindling away from full household activity into getting old

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

We all nourish truth with our tongues not in sour-batter words that never take shape nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt. We all use simply the words of our own lives to say what we really want, to lie spent on our lovers, put teeth to all we hate, to strain the juice of our history between what has been allowed and what has always been denied, the active desire to take hold of the root.

I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard.

Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

It was death Aunt Ruth was thinking about all the time. Death was the reason she had talked so much, so intently, death was the fire burning her up. With every breath and laugh and wiped-away tear, she had been dying.

My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.

What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life's wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.