Quotes About Life

A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.

Who are we, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.

Dalle tende a cono si levava il concerto dei pesanti respiri addormentati. Cosa fosse quel poter chiudere gli occhi, perdere coscienza di sé, affondare in un vuoto delle proprie ore, e poi svegliandosi ritrovarsi eguale a prima, a riannodare i fili della propria vita, Agilulfo non lo poteva sapere e la sua invidia per la facoltà di dormire propria delle persone esistenti era un'invidia vaga, come di qualcosa che non si sa nemmeno concepire.

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the acton changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.

With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.

nh?ng có lúc ngòi bút ch? rào r?o b?i m?c, không l?n ch?y b?ng m?t gi?t ??i, và cu?c ??i thì toàn b? ?n goài kia, bên ngoài ô c?a s?, bên ngoài b?n, và b?n c?m th?y mình s? không bao gi? còn có th? n??ng náu n?i trang gi?y b?n ?ang vi?t

I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.

La vita d'una persona consiste in un insieme d'avvenimenti di cui l'ultimo potrebbe anche cambiare il senso di tutto l'insieme, non perché conti di più dei precedenti ma perché inclusi in una vita gli avvenimenti si dispongono in un ordine che non è cronologico, ma risponde a un'architettura interna.

Le imprese più ardite vanno vissute con l'animo più semplice. (Cosimo Piovasco Barone di Rondò)

In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can't imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.

Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in

Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids.

Si arriva a un momento della vita in cui tra la gente che si è conosciuta i morti sono più dei vivi. E la mente si rifiuta di accettare altre fisionomie, altre espressioni: su tutte le facce nuove che incontra, imprime i vecchi calchi, per ognuna trova la maschera che s'adatta di più.

That's how it is: everything women have been told about love has been wrong. They've been told all sorts of things, but all wrong. And their experiences, all imprecise. And yet, they trust the things they're told, not the experiences. [...] And yet, it's easier for women. Life flows in them, a great river, in them, the perpetuators, nature is sure and mysterious, in them.

The taste for the spontaneous, natural, lifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present. Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative quality, even if the picture was taken the day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself." - from "The Adventure of a Photographer

I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,' they asked, 'to know this tune before you die?

Pensé: —Uno llega a un momento de la vida en que de la gente que ha conocido son mas los muertos que los vivos. Y la mente se niega a aceptar otras fisonomías, otras expresiones: en todas las caras nuevas que encuentra, imprime los viejos calcos, para cada una encuentra la máscara que más se adapta.

Cosimo did not yet know love, and what is any experience without that? What point is there in risking life, when the real flavor of life is as yet unknown?

l'arte di scriver storie sta nel saper tirare fuori da quel nulla che si è capito della vita tutto il resto. ma finita la pagina si riprende la vita e ci s'accorge che quel che si sapeva è proprio un nulla.

Ogni vita è un enciclopedia, una biblioteca, un campionario di stili, dove tutto può essere continuamente rimescolato e riordinato in tutti i modi possibili

in short, life would be maintained as it had gone on till then, in its achieved, perfect forms, without metamorphoses or additions with dubious outcome, and every individual would be able to develop his own nature, to arrive at the essence of himself and of all things.

Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.