Quotes About Life

It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.' 'So why live at all?' 'Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too. Now, what life do you want to choose next?

She liked this life – or more precisely, she liked the version of herself in this life.

If one advances confidently,' Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.' He'd also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life.

The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stag too long in a place, you forget just how big and expanse the world is. You get no sense of length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense the vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of the neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

In the face of death, life seemed more attractive, and as life seemed more attractive

It was pathetic really, the amount of possibilities she had squandered.

because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.

So, do you want to live a life you could be living? Do you want to do something differently? Is there anything you wish to change? Did you do anything wrong?' That was an easy one. 'Yes. Absolutely everything.

It was, she decided, a very good time to die.

A human life is on average eighty Earth years or around thirty thousand Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

Now, consider this. A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die.

So, in this life, she was doing her bit to save the planet. Or at least to monitor the steady devastation of the planet in order to alert people to the facts of environmental crisis. That was potentially depressing but also a good and ultimately fulfilling thing to do, she imagined. There was purpose. There was meaning.

There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.

The Book of Regrets 'Every regret you have ever had, since the day you were born, is recorded in here

This was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn't something you measure, and life isn't a race you can win. It's all . . . bollocks, actually .

It's hard to predict, isn't it? The things that will make us happy.