Quotes About Life

With all its many risks, this life endures No more than windblown bubbles in a stream. How marvelous to breathe in and out again, To fall asleep and then awake refreshed.

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers' document it is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.

I grew up in a food-obsessed Italian family, so food was always front and center in my life. I was a food obsessed person who morphed into a comedian and tried to figure out a way to make fun of my cake and eat it too.

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

Pero las cuestiones humanas no conducían a conclusiones tajantes, al trazado de una línea ni a una suma total. Parecían resolverse, disolverse, cuando sólo se estaban formando de nuevo, reuniéndose en otra combinación. Incluso cuando estamos muertos, lo que hicimos continúa tramando estas nuevas combinaciones.

Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women--a new job, a new town, a divorce--which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.

A child is born where his mother suffers most-- is that not always true?

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

At my age it is unseemly to be pessimistic.

Si la vie s'est écoulée, sa racine est le présent. Arrose-là de l'eau du repentir. Alors le poison de l'an dernier se change en sucre, les mauvaises actions se transforment en dévotion, le passé lui-même devient sans tache.

Human beings are unable to be about the serious business of living and building societies if they feel compelled to always clown or entertain others. People do not take you seriously if you don't take yourself seriously. A sense of humor brings necessary balance to an organized life, but a life of humor blinds one to life.

I don't want to lose my memories. Don't make me forget. I would rather die as Elena, than live as a shadow.

The longer you live, the more mistakes you make. And the more sorrows you carry.

A life is not a waste of time