Quotes About Life

As you can see, instead of HAVING...DOING...BEING, life works in better harmony when you are BEING...DOING...HAVING. After all, you are NOT a human HAVE-ing nor a Human DO-ing. You are a human BE-ing.

We can talk about our dreams all night, Lisette. We can talk forever, for the rest of our lives, living one adventure after another, I promise. But not now, my darling Lisette. For now, all I can think of is the brilliance of yet another ancient Greek, Sophocles. He said, 'One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life-that word is love.' I love you, Lisette. You bring my life joy I've never known. Please, marry me.

a man be wise it is no shame for him to live and learn.' Sophocles.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

One's own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there. It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.

She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

A 'career woman,' Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. A spinster, she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. Perhaps you will never marry, Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,' Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. It was good enough for Jane Austen.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother's arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened - how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn't have.

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

I think I would rather just live my life," Teddy said, "not make an artifice of it.

It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. Who said life was fair? his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. (It's not fair, Daddy.) Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise.

The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittery starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more"… Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.

Because life is an adventure, of course." "I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.

Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.

the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.