Quotes About Life

Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways

It's about thinking that being blond & slim & perfect will automatically bring you happiness, & then discovering that life is as full of as many disappointments as there were before.

Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart.

Where there is life, there is hope.

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

I'd forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once, you know what the pull of gravity feels like. And you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.

I will hear a noise, like a fish jumping, and when I look I'll see Lizzy coming to the surface, shaking off her pink scales, finding her new arms to do the breaststroke to shore.

She could never be part of so much of his turbulent history, his youthful adventure, where life had been deeply felt.

Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world.

I've seen cruelty in my life. I was raised on a constant diet of humiliation. If you think a spanking and the threat of more punishment will bring me to my knees in blind submission to you, you abducted the wrong damn girl.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding. What dissolves will dissolve-- you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.

Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.

Bash? wrote, "The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

I know I shouldn't be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I've thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I'm captivated by the mountain stream's interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life.

The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of literature's windows. They keep us from stifling solipsism, by returning the personal self to connection with what is beyond it.