Quotes About Life

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

So I wonder what it is this need to tell. To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb, the dead never do ...

There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.

They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn't they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?

Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back.

One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.

So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn't have TV.

Ha. Admit it: you don't have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into. Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the finning crowd at any moment. Which she did.

I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

the craggy gorge reminded me that we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you're not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn't die.

The sadness of our world, it underlies everything like a water.

he thought he could sit on this deck and watch that stream for the rest of his life.

The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything.

What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It's harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person.

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occurred to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. And life was inside death, virulent and insistent as a strain of flu. How it should be. It

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman's screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

life does not get less strange.

It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark. That they endured in the weather and the seasons.

Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not knowing it. Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it's too late.

with a sense of having been spared and having been blessed.