Quotes About Life

To Save Time is to Lengthen Life," proclaimed the Remington Typewriter Company.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

The life of human beings is suspended between the poles of heaven and earth. Let us retain within us the width of heaven, but let us not forget the earth that bears us. Earth and heaven are the symbols of the finite and the infinite, in which we share equally. It is not our task to choose between these two poles of our existence or to give up the one for the sake of the other, but to recognize their mutual interdependence and to integrate them into our very being.

This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them.

Life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

You miss the half of it, and more. There's always as much belowground as above. That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. —RACHEL CARSON

Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good - as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain's sting and the smell of living soil - the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

Time didn't age you; memory did.

wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That's what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.

For there is hope of a tree, if it goes down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender branches will not cease. Though the root grows old in the earth, and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs. But man, man wastes away and dies and gives up the ghost, and where is he?

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.

I wouldn't need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this-- this , the growing rings of light and water and stone--would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.

Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.

We are made for art . . . The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate.