Quotes About Life

as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever;

My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.

It was the most important night of my life,' he said calmly. 'It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most.' 'Which is?' 'To live without thinking.

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. That's Life. That's what they all said. That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see.

Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe.

A picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or—if death is a journey to another place—that you will not see him again?" He opened his lexicon and began to search for his place. "It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark.

There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?

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.

the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn't, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe.

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see.