Quotes About Life

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others.

When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.

Bir ölüm ferman? ç?karmak zaten yeterince kötüydü, ama ölmü? bir adam için çal??mak en az onun kadar kötüydü.

What he does not know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation—that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life.

La vida nos arrastra de muchas maneras que no podemos controlar y casi nada permanece con nosotros.

A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd.

Non è cosa da poco dover ricominciare la propria vita a cinquantasette anni; e quando un uomo non dispone di altre carte che il cervello che ha nella testa e la lingua che ha nella bocca, deve pensarci bene prima di decidersi ad aprire quella bocca e parlare.

Quando hai vissuto a lungo come me tendi a pensare di aver ascoltato di tutto, di non poterti più stupire di nulla. Ti viene pure voglia di vantarti della tua esperienza del mondo e poi, ogni tanto, ti ritrovi di fronte a qualcosa che ti catapulta fuori dal bozzolo di goduta superiorità, ricordandoti da capo che della vita non capisci un bel niente.

One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is our life: The Austers - was totally blank inside.

murió de neumonía, o lo que es lo mismo, murió de viejo: una muerte envidiable, a tu juicio, una vida vivida hasta bien entrada la novena década y luego, en lugar de la electrocución por un rayo, la oportunidad de asimilar el hecho de que te vas de este mundo, la ocasión de reflexionar durante un tiempo, para luego quedarse dormido y entrar flotando en el reino de la nada.

Pour employer une expression qui m'a toujours plu, j'ai découvert que je vivais des jours empruntés.

Contrary to what many people want to believe, the novel is in good shape these days, as healthy and vigorous as it's ever been. It's an inexhaustible form, and no matter what the pessimists say, it's never going to die... Because a novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

te encontraste cayendo por la fisura entre el mundo y la palabra, el abismo que separa la existencia humana de nuestra capacidad de entender o expresar la verdad de la vida, y por motivos que te siguen desconcertando, aquella súbita caída por el aire vacío y sin límites te inundó de una sensación de libertad y felicidad.

God was nowhere, he said to himself, but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere, and the living and the dead were joined.

Life can last just so long, you understand. Everything else is in the room, with darkness, with God's language, with screams. Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on.

those men worked in order to live, whereas his father seemed to live in order to work, which meant that his parents' friends were defined more by their enthusiasms than their burdens or responsibilities,

Tu non vuoi cambiare il mondo, Archie, tu vuoi capirlo per trovare il modo di riuscire a viverci.

Em outras palavras: medo de morrer, o que em última análise não é outra coisa que não medo de viver

Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies,' I said, trying to be as succinct as possible, 'and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance.

Angesichts der Schwierigkeiten, vor die uns die reale Welt stellte, war es wohl ganz verständlich, daß wir ihr so oft es ging den Rücken kehrten.

a lire belongs only to the person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live.

La petite mort' and 'la grande mort' within ten seconds of each other—coming and going in the space of three short breaths.

Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death. Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there's a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond his control.