Quotes About Life

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. . . . Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.

cause London is drowning and I— I live by the river.

Fritz's first radical premise is that everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us.

We are constantly given one-size-fits-all formulas, but those formulas fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.

Isn't it always unfair - death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete.

But Nonor always said that the Fates don't carve, they weave. Isla does her best to make sure her sister always remembers that. The Fates take the threads that we make from the things we do, Nonor would say, the choices we make, big ones and small ones, all of them, and they weave them in and out, through and under, all the time. They never stop their weave. But they can only use the threads we give them.

Life is short, but it is wide. Genevieve Whitman taught me that.

Books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them.

It's life, Sidda. You just climb on the beast and ride.

You cannot escape from life. Life is not a book. You can't just set it down on the coffee table and walk away from it when it gets boring or you get tired.

You don't get no trophies for livin the life you born into. It just be your job, and you lucky if you can do the work set out in front of you and not fret if it seem puny. Chaney, Little Altars Everywhere

How many years went by unnoticed, unembraced?

Uncountable the number off breaths I've taken for granted in my life.

The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad, and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch still surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner . . .I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Life is not a book. You can't just set it down on the coffee table and walk away from it when it gets boring or you get tired.

Life is short, but it is wide. This too shall pass.

the ocean is my mother.

Looking up at her, Teensy said, Any baggage you have, Bébé, ceased to be only yours the minute that sperm hit that egg.

Uncountable the number of breaths I've taken for granted in my life.

she repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music

It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.

we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.