Quotes About Life

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

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

It did not fit with the new age of conformity that was coming in all things, even emotions, and it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though naming life in some way described its mystery or denied its chaos.

Thinking: The world is. It just is.

a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.

The lie was one they - children, doctors, nurses - all encourage. 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.

the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; 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.

Trecutul nu este soarta ta, singura iti faci viata, ca atunci cand conduci masina, fie incet, neriscand nimic, necastigand nimic, fie repede, cand tot ceea ce conteaza e ce ai in fata, in clipa asta, iar tot ce e in spate nu mai are relevanta.

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

I thought that the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me at that moment and all the people who owned the cars that were nosed-in to their proper places in the lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the trailers by the gold mine, was how well you were able to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them, and maybe too, by how many troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetime.

Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it's all you have to go on.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.

there's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one—only plenty of wrong ways.

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.

All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.

The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.

no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you're willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from--anything at all can follow anything at all.

Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible — time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.

Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

that life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely.