Quotes About Life

Honey, Kate is not going to die sooner because you have one more glass of mine, or because you stay overnight in a hotel, or because you let yourself crack up at a bad joke. So sit your ass back down and turn up the volume and act like you're a normal person.

the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

He's too busy living to talk about dying. -Cara

What if the characters in a book had lives of their own after the cover was closed?

A level of a house, his father has told him, is called a story. Nathaniel likes that. It makes him feel like maybe he is living between the covers of a book himself. Like maybe everyone in every home is sure to get a happy ending.

You can invent any fiction and call it a life. Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.

I thought I knew this world. I thought I could control it. But just when you think you've got your life by the reins, that's when it's most likely to run away from you.

When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it's not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.

I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

could not be blamed just because no one ever mentioned that once you closed the storybook, Cinderella still had to do laundry and clean the toilet and take care of the crown prince.

Now, I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

Because it takes more strength to change someone else's life than it takes to change your own.

whatever does happen the way it's supposed to? You don't plan life, you just do it.

I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people have children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. —WALLACE STEGNER, THE SPECTATOR BIRD

The terrible thing about falling in love is that real life always gets in the way.

The baby's body lay in a bassinet. He was the size of a half loaf of bread, his bones light as a bird's and stretched with thin skin.

Every life has a beginning, a middle, and an end; dissect history and you'll see the word that defines it as a tale, a narrative.

I want to finish what I started." Life asked death, "Why do people love me but hate you?" Death responded, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth." —Unknown

I know it feels crass to talk about death in such mercenary terms, but that's the very problem with death in the first place. We don't know how to talk about it. We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there. We treat it like a mystery, when in fact, it's the one experience all of us are guaranteed to share.

It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

I believe in Hell . . . but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.

there were things I knew for sure: That I had been loved, once, and had loved back. That a person could find hope in the way a weed grew. That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.