Quotes About Life

Time can do all sorts of things. It's almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There's nothing that time can't do. Except run backwards. That's its trouble really, it can only go one way.

Ha! I like the world, kid. I like its sense of humour. I like the way it gets its own back on the know-it-alls and the stuck-ups and the well-meaners.

Each little update - each individual bit of social information - is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Pour l'essentiel de sa courte vie, il avait œuvré à garder son indépendance. Une fois qu'un homme commençait à collectionner les obligations, tout se déréglait, et il se retrouvait face aux murs d'une prison construite de ses propres mains.

If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.

One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love, and to long life.

The grand offence of Jesus was this: He was not the man they had taken Him for; He was not going to be at their service to promote the ends they had in view. Whatever He meant by the bread of life, or by eating His flesh, it was plain that He was not going to be a bread-king, making it His business to furnish supplies for their physical appetites, ushering in a golden age of idleness and plenty.

The love of Christ remained for them throughout life a thing passing knowledge; and the longer they lived, the more cordially did they acknowledge the truth of their Master's words: "Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see

For that process means practically the removal of moral hindrances to life and growth,--the cares of life, the insidious influence of wealth, the lusts of the flesh, and the passions of the soul,--evils which cannot be overcome unless our will and all our moral powers be brought to bear against them. Hence Jesus lays it upon His disciples as a duty to abide in Him, and have Him abiding in them, and resolves the whole matter at last, in plain terms, into keeping His commandments.

Specially remarkable is the first thought to which He gave utterance in these words: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

How often we sit weeping — you and I — over the life we lead! My friends, if you only knew the darkness of the days ahead!

And all my former life is seen—a crazy drowsy beautiful and utterly appalling dream.

When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.

There is light suddenly everywhere, the light of your life speaking to you. What it tells you is almost the same as what happened. Never mind that almost isn't good enough; it's all you have.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for.

And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.

Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road wound through life

Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times. Here is the ax.

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

That art -- even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated somehow to tenderness, dedicated as a lover who would offer something to her beloved in the last nights they'll share before she leaves this life forever -- is not weak. It is strength.

A singer learned her roles for life - your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed.

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates. The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.

When writers in New York complained they could not write after 9/11, it seemed to me they were frozen by writing for that audience, by writing for the missing. Who we all felt, somehow, were watching. Waiting to see if we were worthy of being alive when they were dead. Waiting to see the stories we would tell about the life they would no longer have among us - waiting to see if it was worth it.

I wanted to prepare for a life of sudden transformations, of enemies singing at you across the stage dressed in the costume of a lover.