Quotes About Life

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts," from Collected Poems Jane Austen Russell Banks, Continental Drift Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader The Holy Bible Elizabeth Bishop Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer

joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesting. People shared too much, she said, not too little. She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason.

How does a doctor tell you that it's over, that there are things they could do but probably shouldn't, and that if your aim is quality of life and not quantity of life, there simply are no good next treatments?

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time. Yet

Mom agreed but pointed out that she'd been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. "I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying

You can die now, with three healthy children, your husband of almost fifty years alive and well, and five grandchildren whom you love and who love you, all well, all happy'—well, I think Mom would have thought that wasn't a bad deal.

life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death." I

book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,

I'm on a search—and have been, I now realize, all my life—to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I'm at it.

remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.

Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways—that's just the nature of unforeseen ways.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one. I

Crossing to Safety,

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,

one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

Whilst we play life as a game, our conscious experience of it takes the form of a story.