Quotes About Life

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light.

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.

All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the disinterested parents.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated. The city at that moment was not a place that anyone would remember with nostalgia, except for the fact that in the midst of all this, if you played it right, your money could double, and you could buy a big apartment with triple-glazed windows that overlooked the chaos.

oh boo hoo , everyone's life was hard, and if you'd survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough.

how many of the phrases that came to mind when thinking about his own life, were somehow sea-related. Her interest had ebbed. They were both drowning in their sorrow. He had sunk lower than ever before. The vocabulary of the ocean seemed tailored to loss.

the rest of life—that imperfect thing—waiting.

Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago...She hadn't been able to see it but it was real. Otherwise why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn't really know? Who would do that unless she had to?

Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated.

Wasn't one of the goals of life to comfortable in your own skin and in your own bed and on your own land? But as soon as you achieved it, you felt an immense sadness, and then you wanted to wreck everything around you, just because you could. Comfort was the best thing, and maybe the worst.

But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don't appear at the time as knowledge at all

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers.

Maybe the secret truth about death is that dead people are whisked away from their current lives and forced to live somewhere else far away—a process similar to reincarnation but taking place not in the future but now. A sort of mortality-based witness protection program. And if you found them they would look the same as they always had. If only you knew where to find them. If only you knew where to look.

There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.

I've always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're not what you thought. And that's what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.

In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.

The bad moment had fled. All you ever had to do to make a bad moment flee was acquiesce. This was true everywhere in life, even though so much of Loci's focus was supposedly on not acquiescing.

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need.

Siempre he tenido la sensación de que uno se pasa la vida como… preparándose para los grandes momentos, ¿sabes? Pero cuando llegan, a veces no te sientes nada preparado, o incluso resulta que no son como habías pensado. Y eso es lo que los hace extraños. La realidad es realmente distinta de la fantasía.

I think how easy it would be to go through life as a goat. You don't have any problems. You don't fall in love, so you don't get crushed by loss. You just have your simple, farm-animal life, which I envy now.

happen. And you don't always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.