Quotes About Life

The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, it will follow wherever you go.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom.

Els puts his eye to a burst of stars. They cluster, a blue star nursery, spraying out new worlds. He feels like he did two years ago, when he first looked at a glowing stain of cells under the 1,000x objective and realized that life happens elsewhere, on scales that have nothing to do with him.

He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise.

Her own life had been a haze of privilege, narcissism, and impossibly extended adolescence, filled with mean, sardonic hipness and self-protection. Now she has been called.

She looks like someone summoned to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of life.

How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery

Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)

The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man ... Unless man .

If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death.

Life's moment is here. A test that it has not yet had.

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.

They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

Someone who doesn't even know she's been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.

Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight.

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

After tens of thousands of pages, they've circled back to Tolstoy and are now a good inch and a half into Anna Karenina. Dot resumes the story with no trace of self-consciousness or shame, no hint that art and life have enrolled in the same drawing class. And that, for Ray, is the greatest mercy fiction gives: proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.

MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.

He is no longer the man imprisoned by all the wrong answers at the end of his interrupted life. All at once my father is a child, as uncertain, terrified, and abandoned to the terrible abundance of being alive as I am.

No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.

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

Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light. It tilts the prospects for life a little. For me, the best class sessions are right up there with lying in the sun, listening to bluegrass, or swimming in a mountain stream.