Quotes About Life

We are all dying of something, always, but our degrees of awareness differ - from Tubes

It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.

Life is hell but death is worse. - from No Deposit

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn't include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

We die of habits, deplorable ones like merely living: finally fatal. - from Tubes

When a long-desired baby is born, what joy! More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth. But should the same infant die, would you measure the horror on the same rule? Grief weighs down the seesaw, joy cannot budget it.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, I don't enjoy doing press. I've been asked the same questions a million times now, and I don't particularly like talking about my personal life.

Growth is an indication of life, so keep your organization moving forward at all times. Having a passion for what you do is crucial. If you can't get excited about what you are doing, how can you expect anyone else to?

Dive from a high platform, walk a country lane, watch your computer freeze, cross a finish line, hear your morning alarm, look for a parking space, toast on your anniversary, embrace a friend after a funeral. As you live your life, what do you feel? Terror, serenity, frustration, relief, groaning reluctance, patient endurance, pride, satisfaction, or a grief made bearable because somehow life will go on. We experience life as feelings.

I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.

I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.

Fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life … the great stories go to those who don't give in to fear.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants.

But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.

It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don't have integrity, life becomes exhausting.

I think life is staggering and we're just too used to it.

Remarkably, the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they'd had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.

God made a whole beautiful earth and decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty. You can't do that watching television all the time.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.