Quotes About Life

He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo café. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet.

To die of old age...is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of not living.

The lie was one they - children, doctors, nurses - all encouraged. The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.

One man's feeling is not always equal to all that life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.

It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now finding so many others. Life wasn't about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo. Decades

The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.

But sometimes [love] was just there: ... he was ... shocked to know he had been lucky to live and know it, to love and be loved.

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He

He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But

You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life. Fyodor Dostoevsky

You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They

I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything

the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family.

Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life.

death poem of Hyakka

To control the deaths of others - when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending - that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.

After all, it wasn't food; it was survival.