Quotes About Life

Nothing anyone can do for anyone, except to recall: We are every second being born.

It's a programmed telephone support system for living on Earth. It's the mind moving through mysteries, their explanations forever one more choice away.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.

The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.

The third Hoel photographer keeps on taking pictures, just as he keeps going to church long after deciding that the entire faithful world has been duped by fairy tales. His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr.'s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give. It's a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only aslightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

In the dark, she asks, What are you thinking? He's thinking that his life has reached its zenith, this very day. That he has lived to see everything he wants. Lived to see himself happy.

Apparently God had made life on one planet only, and only one country of that planet's dominant species needed to manage it.

People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear.

Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they're a day. She wouldn't be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years. That's why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. All the drama of the world is gathering underground—massed symphonic choruses that Patricia means to hear before she dies.

Old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity. . . .

I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don't worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

Ese es el problema de la gente, la raíz de todo. La vida pasa a su lado desapercibida. Aquí mismo, muy cerca de ellos. En la creación del suelo. En el ciclo del agua. En el intercambio de nutrientes. En la formación del clima. En la construcción de la atmósfera. En la alimentación, curación y refugio de más tipos de criaturas de las que son capaces de contar.

Muziek dient ertoe ons eraan te herinneren dat we maar heel kort een lichaam hebben.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

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.

This land of animated wishes will expand without limits. It will fill with richer, wilder, more surprising life beyond life. The map will grow as full as the thing it stands for. And still people will be hungry and alone.

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.