Quotes About Life

This is a book about me, at what I hope is the beginning of the second half of my life and not the brief, final tenth.

I told him there is no Words with Friends in this life: there is only Scrabble, with enemies.

It is love's soft breath on life's dark coals that briefly reds the fire.

Nonsubordination is the simple, unspectacular struggle to shape one's life. It is people's reluctance to give up the simple pleasures of life, their reluctance to become machines, the determination to forge and maintain some degree of power-to.

Identity negates possibility, denies openness to other life. Identity kills, both metaphorically and very, very literally.

You don't spell it, son. You eat it.

Life is serious but art is fun!

and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

Death, it seems, Garp wrote, does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

Life, Garp wrote, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.

but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

You don't sound very well Owen. I pointed out to him. IF JESUS HAD TO BE BORN ON A DAY LIKE THIS. I DON'T THINK HE'D HAVE LASTED LONG ENOUGH TO BE CRUCIFIED. Owen said.

TODAY'S THE DAY! '… HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.

the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

You are my work of art, Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you, Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

There was no solution," Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, "but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is forget oneself.

You know what I love... everything.