Quotes About Life

He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what means to be alive.

After I was born - and maybe that is not the right word, but if not, then I don't know what is. Woke? Hatched? No, that is worse. I am not an egg. I will say born.

The first good deed in your dissolute life. Aren't you curious what it would feel like?" He laughed, but I did not press him further. He was still, always, an Olympian, still Zeus' son. I was allowed license because it amused him, but I never knew when that amusement might end. You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

More delicately, more intricately fashioned than any grasses of the field, more subtle in texture than any seaweed of the sea, more thickly woven, and with a sort of intimate passionate patience, by the creative spirit within it, than any forest leaves or any lichen upon any tree trunk, this sacred moss of Somersetshire would remain as a perfectly satisfying symbol of life if all other vegetation were destroyed out of that country. There is a religious reticence in the nature of moss.

The evening of this perfect May Day was of a loveliness comparable with the hours that had preceded it. In certain subtle respects it was even more beautiful, just as in certain ways sleep is more beautiful than waking and death than life.

Mr. Geard was one of those men whose physical phlegm is so thick and deep that it requires a series of material shocks to rouse the full awareness in them of the taste and tang of life.

He had only one life. That was a basic and relentless fact. An eternity of 'something or other' lay behind him, and an equally obscure eternity of 'something or other' lay in front of him.

If no one were allowed to be thrilled by anything, as long as someone is made wretched by something, the life of the whole planet would perish!

There are times in life, little lady, he said, when we can only listen to the ticking of the clock of fate and wait for what is destined to happen. This is one of those times.

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising.

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

Death is a difficulty, but it is not a punishment for the wrongdoings of our first parents; life is difficult, but it is not a trial through which we must pass to earn an eternal reward. Mortality is not a wounding disability but the enabling condition that lends life its intensity, tenderness, poignancy, and beauty, let us say its wounded glory, the difficult glory, that has tasted the bitter truth.

The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them.

Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame.

It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.

Today, my friends, we each have one day less, every one of us. And joy is the only thing that slows the clock.

Sam, darling, when you suddenly look around you and see that—life itself is the basic magic, the real miracle, then we might have a chance. You are trying to impose your sense of order and fitness on the randomness of people and the illogic of fate. You want to refute the basic textures, the crazy mixture of life, and neaten it all up.

Because I know that everything we have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence.

The living are worth every final bit of love and energy you can toss into the kitty. The dead are worth tears. Trying to do more for the dead is self-love. It's pride gone bad. It's romantic nonsense.

Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought.

John D. MacDonald

Sempre teremos de morrer

Aqui, tanto no espaço, como no tempo, parecemos ter sido trazidos para um pouco mais perto desse grande facto - o mistério dos mistérios -, o aparecimento pela primeira vez, de novos seres nesta Terra.