Quotes About Life

The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control.

We must discover a source of inner security before we can withstand the insecurities that every life holds. Children are not ready for this, nor are teenagers, nor are young adults. Honest soul work is usually done in the second half of life, although it is forced on some much earlier through imprisonment or family tragedy.

one consistent and clear revelation in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, it is that the God of Israel is the one who turns death into life (see Deuteronomy 32:39, Romans 4:17, 2 Corinthians 1:9). When we can trust the transformative pattern, when we can trust that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds and the actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey, trusting God to be in all things, especially

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

We wear the chains we forge in life

No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.

Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you? Sully: Not often. Now and then.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels.

For years now he'd believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

Lincoln couldn't help wondering if what had happened at Rockers was best viewed as an isolated incident or as part of a long-established pattern, one that could be summed up as Teddy's life not, to borrow Coffin's term, working out . Even back at Minerva, Teddy had seemed resigned to the likelihood that it wouldn't. Which begged a question: Had Teddy meekly accepted what he saw as the invisible trajectory of his life, or had he courageously accepted what he couldn't possibly change?

A silly lie. A lie so small and to so little purpose that it suggested to Miles a way of life, a strategy for confronting the world, and this was further reason—if any was needed—to doubt the truth of everything the man had said inside.

She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

wasn't in fact possible to strip life of its clutter for the simple reason that life was clutter.

What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots. There was no such thing as continual good fortune—or misfortune, except for the Red Sox, whose curse seemed eternal.

she'd come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time.

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

Richard Russo

That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property. They