Quotes About Life

The living always get over the dead. That's what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they'd only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.

My mother was a very Viennese type of Austrian, Bernie. We're always committing suicide, you know. Its a way of life for us.

Our lives are shaped by the choices we make, of course, and more noticeably by the choices that were wrong.

The poem says you only think you're alive but about to be born your radioactive heliographs mock the moon's tongue." — Philip Lamantia, "Fin Del Mundo

One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death's terror and delirium. - Heads in the Women's Ward

life is first boredom, then fear. whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then the only end of age.

Here is unfenced existence

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.

I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!

Men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found.

Have I been wrong, to think the breath That sharpens life is life itself, not death?

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Most things are never meant. - Going, Going

he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.

Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line

I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there's my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

He [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder.

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, Spreads slowly through them — — Philip Larkin, from "Faith Healing," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.