Quotes About Life

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.

What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time. Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated

From the movie Everything is Illuminated based on a book by Jonathan Safran Foer: I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine.

It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

How did her life live itself without her.

Life is precious, Jacob thought. The most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to.

It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.

In the end I was the clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.

Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?

There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes--mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life--but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.