Quotes About Life

Why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

Some Englishman once said marriage is a long dull meak with pudding served first

Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere 'etc.,' and people who don't value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the 'etc.

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.

I wish life was like banking,' I said. 'I don't mean it's straightforward. Some of it's incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there's someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it's too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven't understood it.

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.

There is the question of accumulation (...) just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?

forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Truths about writing can be framed before you've published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it's too late to make any difference.

And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments.

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn´t all it´s cracked up to be.

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.

That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

He died a modern death, in hospital,........after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive.

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. "He took his own life" is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories.

To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.

My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for—and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.