Quotes About Life

The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies and the little dusty quick ants. Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him. He watched the ants moving, a little column of them near to his foot, and he put his foot in their path. Then the column climbed over his instep and continued on its way, and Kino left his foot there and watched them move over it.

But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I'll never get used to being alive. It's a mystery. Always startled to find I've survived.

You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn't of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that's not your business.They should've trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.

Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.

The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space has ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, traveling to Honolulu.

It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.

A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. ... When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.

It's like a life--so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it. Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life.

Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.

Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn't very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It ... tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, ... crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live ... In the winter, it becomes a torrent, ... and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased

I know this - a man got to do what he got to do, I can't tell you. I don't think they's luck or bad luck. On'y one thing in the worl' I'm sure of, an' that's I'm sure nobody got a right to mess with a fella's life. He got to do it all hisself, Help im, maybe, but not tell him what to do.

Misfortune is not fair, fate is not just, but they exist just the same.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror

That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?

And her eyes were on the highway, where life whizzed by.

A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete

And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.