Quotes About Life

He's reached the age when dead is the new normal.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

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

Sih Hsuin gasps. "Look the color!" The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green.

Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except in the daily life she leads. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

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.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear.

He's never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

A woman in the coda of life, raising her eyes and lifting her hands in that moment just before fear turns into knowledge.

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: 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. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say.

He lies still in the dark, hungry, listening to the birds discuss life in a thousand ancient dialects: bickering, turf war, recollection, praise, joy.

Ao testemunhar o fracasso da medicina perante o meu filho, desenvolvi uma teoria esdrúxula: A vida é algo que temos de parar de corrigir. O meu pequeno era um universo de bolso que eu jamais poderia aspirar a sondar. Cada um de nós é uma experiência, e nem sequer sabemos o que está a experiência a testar. Ninguém é perfeito. Mas, caramba, todos ficamos tão lindamente aquém.

legend crystallized her life (Sarah Bernhardt) until she became her observers' rumors. At the end, we all become edited copy.

How ethical is it to let these animals go a long time before they die?

The DNA molecule is shaped like a twisted ladder, and the rungs of the ladder—the nucleotides—can hold vast amounts of information, the code of life. A gene is a short stretch of DNA, typically about a thousand letters long, that holds the recipe for a protein or a group of related proteins. The total assemblage of an organism's genetic code—its full complement of DNA, comprising all its genes—is the organism's genome.

They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.

Einstein was arguing against quantum theory just as irrationally as his opponents had argued against relativity theory. Einstein remained adamant (he remained adamant to the end of his life where quantum theory was concerned).

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

The character damage of a trauma survivor," he concludes, "can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim's inner life.

We saw people -- they were so far away but we knew they were people, they were not cinders or the leaves of calendars; we saw people who had no alternatives but to consign their bodies -- their bodies, I say, but I mean their lives -- to the air, people who are loved, I believe, by God, even as I believe their murderers are loved by God. Falling.

The power the old exert over the young is the power to send the young to war -- flesh in its perfection dropped into a hellish maze of stimulus and response in order to defend an old man's phrase. A phrase! What? The American way of life? Yes. It galls me to say it, but yes. This paragraph costs me nothing. And yet I know it cost the life of a boy or a girl with a ready body and a mind not ripe. N one will come to question me this evening.

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.