Quotes About Life

take details from "real life" into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.

She was an actress in the theater of true life, so good that no one suspected what was hidden behind the artfully applied makeup and carefully pinned hairnet.

She was an actress in the theater of true life

I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.

She caught up her purse and she ran, ran as if she raced with Death, and as if Death were the fleeter of foot.

He'd always, all of his life, loved the sound of breaking water. Nothing that had happened had changed that. The crawling of water over sand, the hush of a word no … no … no … not even that had changed his love of the power of the sea.

One knows, when all one's life one has walked in dangerous places, when the silence is that of ambush and when the silence is that of emptiness.

Intelligence is the only indispensable commodity in life or in warfare. If you think otherwise, go live in a hut with a poet. The rest of us will do our best to defend you.

Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don't rush your judgements.

A man of over thirty might be held to be at the height of his powers, but not necessarily of his wisdom.

It was then that she found that he had laid flat, himself, every defence against her: that she could, if she wished, enter and be received within this, the long-guarded citadel. And so she discovered, fragment by fragment, what he had never told anyone: the inner truth of all those events which, strung together, made up his unruly life.

He will not, I think, find it logical to live with what he has done today. I have told him that you are his responsibility. While he believes that, he will continue to protect you. I tell you this, so that you will understand what is happening. He will measure his life by your helplessness.

Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you. On the tortoise-shell bed, his brother did not move. But there was no irony for once in his voice when he answered. Oh, yes, I know. The popular question is, For what?

He has to perfection, M. le Comte, the art of living his private life with as much public attention as possible.

Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison's.

If time allowed, I should be delighted to discuss my private life in every choice particular with all of you, but it really isn't relevant.

I think you might come to forget, too, that life is more than a science.

Then I tell you,' Sybilla said, 'that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live.

A versatile commodity, death; except for those suffering it.

Then I tell you," Sybilla said, "that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live. You live until no device of priest or leech will hold the web of your body together. And when you walk from this room, you turn your back on France and your face towards the place of your life's work. I want your oath that you will come back to Scotland.

He did not want to live. As the condition of life does, so the condition of death should depend on one's choice. The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Democrites fell on his sword; Aruntius killed himself to fly both the past and the future; Crates said that love would be cured by hunger, if not by time; and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope.

My son ... my son,' said Francis Crawford before the blurred, failing candles, their light searching over his disordered, bent head and closed eyes and the long, scarred lines of his hands, laid flat on the steel. 'So small a spirit, to lodge such sorrows as mankind has brought you. Live ... live ... Wait for me, new, frightened soul. And though the world should reel to a puny death, and the wolves are appointed our godfathers, I will not fail you, ever.

Some love for a living,' said Lymond. 'And some kill.

Men live, not while they breathe, but while they live well.