Quotes About Life

Days 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.

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so. — Philip Larkin, from "Reference Back," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life, and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open." --Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.

The earth drinks all that's left of you and asks for more.

with no morning the day is sold.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

The planets and sun in our galaxy are there to help support life on earth, we are just part of a garden that surrounds a living spring, it is life itself that is the driving force of the universe, it is up to us to help preserve this garden

At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.

Cattle die, kindred die, we ourselves shall die, but I know one thing that never dies: the reputations of each one dead.

They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.

But how luminous are they—literally, how much light are they emitting? This depends on how massive they are: The mass of a star is the single greatest factor in how it lives its life, including its luminosity and its life span.

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world. [Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001]

All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.

Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world. [ Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001 ]

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. "Good practice for life," Uncle said. "Hard knocks, that's all the world's about!" But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.

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