Quotes About Life

I've learned there are givers and takers in this life. I've slowly let the takers go and I've had it for the better. God bless them, when they learn to play by the rules they are welcomed back, but my heart is worth protecting.

You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live inside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience.

Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life - that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower's parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren't alive, their family couldn't function. (page 34)

I turned out the light and lay in my bed and thought about the girls I had dated, the fear I have of getting married, and the incredible selfishness from which I navigate my existence.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you are 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.

misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning.

we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us.

Everything might have come right in the course of time. Russian life could have been pulled into order. . . . What bitch woke up Lenin? Who couldn't bear the child sleeping? There is no precise answer to this question. . . . Anyway, he himself probably didn't know, although his supply of vengeance never dried up. . . .

Decide that life is good and you are special. Decide to enjoy today. Decide that you will live life to the fullest now, no matter what. Trust that you will change what needs changing, but also decide that you're not going to put off enjoying life just because you don't have everything you want now. Steadfastly refuse to let anything steal your joy. Choose to be happy...and you will be.

And then you realize that when you finally meet, when you finally find each other, it doesn't matter. All the rest of it doesn't matter. Life scattered, life together. . . it's just where things begin. It's where the story is when you jump into it. It doesn't stay there. You start writing the next chapter from that moment on.

They hadn't lived long enough to understand what grace it was to die in an instant and not to linger.

Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well.

he could just tabulate all the hours he'd spent talking about politics and politicians during his life and could pack them together like a snowball and somehow add them to his life, how much longer would he live? Even more interesting, how else might he have used that time? He could have learned another language; to knit and have made sweaters or long, uneven scarves for everyone. What colour Judo belt would he be entitled to wear by now?

come face to face with this reminder of what we all know and feel uncomfortable knowing: that life plugs along, no matter what happens to any of us. It puts one foot in front of the other, whistling a tune that is dreary or merry by turn, but it always puts one foot in front of the other and moves on.

hostages to fortune.

He heard footsteps coming from the kitchen and turned to see his wife approaching. In that instant he wanted to take some sort of emotional photograph so that he could, sometime in the future when things were different, pull it out of his memory and look at it and say, 'I've lived a happy life'.

Both of them had always taken delight in this most wonderful of holdovers from the academic Stone Age, the fact that the rector of the university was addressed as "Il Magnifico Rettore," the only thing Brunetti had learned in twenty years on the fringes of the university that had managed to make academic life sound interesting to him.

In the end, no matter how beautiful or precious, what object had any value in comparison to life?

momento mori

And so it went, the detritus of life ordered and sealed in boxes and nothing to be discarded if it might some time be used or needed again.

The old die softly or the old die hard

Life is short, the world is wide, and I wanna make some memories.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.